Go Boldly – tierneycreates

Just wanted to share a quick up on my quilt in progress “Go Boldly”. This is a follow up to this post from March – Update on “Go Boldly” .

I am hand quilting it and really enjoying working on it (I put hand quilting the denim quilt “What Direction Do I Go?” on hold for now) and I’ve made quite a bit of progress laying it on my lap nearly every evening and working on it.

At first I was only going to hand tie it at each corner but then I decided to actual stitch the curves. Hand tying it did help stabilize it as it is nearly a Queen-sized quilt.

Here is the front of the quilt on the floor of my studio, all wrinkly from having it on my lap for hand quilting:

And here is the back of the quilt which was pieced from the leftover blocks and leftover fabric:

Here are a couple more photos of the quilting and Mariss @Fabrications has NO NEED TO WORRY that I will fly over to SA and steal her hand quilting teaching opportunities – ha! But I don’t plan to enter it in any shows and hand quilting it makes me happy 🙂

I am using some rainbow colored variegated heavyweight thread from a collection of thread that I bought back in 1999 at my first sewing expo show! Good thing I didn’t get rid of it – ha! I did use it “someday” as I probably kept telling myself to justify holding onto it 😉

Here is a follow up to the post The Expansion of “Go Boldly” , and an update on my progress on this quilt which I expanded from it’s original size of 56 inches by 56 inches (142 x 142 cm) to 82.5 by 82.5 inches (2.1 x 2.1 meters) by adding additional blocks:

I figured since this was the quilt in the background of my photoshoot for the October 2023 Issue 28: Colorado of Quiltfolk Magazine I should go ahead and finish it.

(A little background on this quilt: my friend D started this quilt four years ago and didn’t want to finish it so she offered me the initial pieced blocks, the templates, and the fabric she bought for the project. I’ve pieced about 50% of the blocks for the quilt and the rest were pieced by D.)

So I got all the blocks sewn together and discovered it was nearly Queen bed size when I laid it out on the guest bed:

I had a bit of remaining fabric and some blocks leftover, but I didn’t want to expand the quilt further.

I decided I didn’t need it to be a real Queen sized quilt as I didn’t plan to use it as a bed quilt as the colors do not go with my decor.

I did however want it to be a colorful large lap quilt to have at say the foot of a bed. So I pieced the remaining blocks into circles as the center part of the back of the quilt:

From there I used remaining fabric to build out the quilt back to be a little bit larger than the quilt top:

Yes it is a messy wrinkly mess as I didn’t iron it before I took the photo. This is the back in progress, I added one more row of fabric to each side to make it bigger than the quilt top.

It will basically be a reversible quilt with the pieced back.

I’ve decided to tie the quilt instead of sending it out for professional long arm quilting. I have some cool heavy weight colorful threads I plan to use to tie it. They are close to thickness of embroidery floss.