Finished Quilt: Cherry Season is Coming

Judy came to my rescue with three quilts for me to treadle-quilt.  (I do have one of my quilts almost ready to quilt, but I didn't want to wait that long to get in some quilting.)

This is a very simple star made from half-square triangles.  With its border, it's about 40 inches square.

It jumped to the head of the line because of that wonderful cherry fabric. I thought it might be a Mary Engelbreit fabric, but it wasn't.  When my mother was shopping for fabric, she'd look at a blank selvedge or one that contained no more information than this and say, "Hmmph!  I guess they're not very proud of it!"

 Here's a close-up of one of the quilted corners.  I lay in the spines first by stitching the left side of the spine from top to bottom and then add the feathers as I travel up the left side.  For the first border, I stop the spine at about the same level as I estimate the tip of the last feathered border will be.  Then when I'm all the way around the quilt (four separate long feathers), I go back and add more stitching so that it's base meets the other feather just before it turns the corner. The quilting shows up pretty well in this green thread.

Because so many of my quilts are for our prayer quilt ministry, I love the symbolism of the new feather on each side, since when life demands that we turn a corner, we start a new journey that's still connected to the former one.

I quilted the star rhomboids in the red thread.

 The triangles and squares around the star were quilted in the neon green.

 The quilting on the green shows up a lot better in the photographs than the red thread does.

 I think this is a case of "you had to be there to see it"......as well as "whatever appears wonky" is due to lack of skill on the part of the photographer.

When I quilted this quilt, I did the quilting in red on the absolutely wonderful vintage Necchi BU that Polly used and protected for years before passing it on to me.  The treadle irons and cabinet are the ones that were on my 1919 Singer Redhead. The irons make little clunks as I treadle them, and I don't know if that is just characteristic of that model of irons or if I need to do some more maintenance and adjusting on them.  The green quilting was done on the once unloved and orphaned vintage Vittorio Necchi BU with countless mechanical issues that I rescued last summer.  I thought I'd never get it unfrozen and stitching again, but it's pretty happy quilting in my set of 1936 Singer irons although the machine has countless weird quirks and pieces that confirm that if it had ever really belonged to her grandmother, the previous custodian or one of her siblings had used it for personal experiments in engineering and mechanics. The irons in which I'm using it are a straight-leg model, and they treadle almost soundlessly, smoothly, and effortlessly.

 The green quilting shows up much better than the red, even on the back.  The straight line of stitching is where I stabilized the quilt first.  I usually use a very fine thread, but I since buy that thread in just neutral colors, I didn't have any of the colors that would have made the stabilizing more discreet.  On the front, even with the Glide thread, the stabilizing is nearly invisible.

These are the two colors of Fil-Tec Glide thread that I used: the red is #90186, and the green is #60398.  When the green arrived, it was much brighter than I expected, and I thought I should only have purchased a 1,000 yard spool.  However, this green has worked well on quite a few fabrics, not just bright fruity or cotton-candy colors. And it's far from neon-looking on this fabric.

And here's one more little homemade treat.  Because these thread colors are just so gorgeous, after I pull a few yards off the end of a bobbin or have a little coffee filter full of thread ends from a quilting project, I often stuff them into a glass ornament.  After making a quilt for a baby, this makes a great first ornament--and of course, you can stuff other bits and pieces in there too.  (The glass ornaments are becoming very difficult to find, so if you want to try this, you might want to check out crafters' yard sales and thrift stores.)

And someday (there's always a someday, isn't there) I'm going to take all the filled ornaments I've kept and attach them to a holiday wreath for my sewing room.

I'm going to join some linky parties with this post. It's always fun to make new friends!
Sew Many Ways
Can I Get a Whoop Whoop
Minutes for Me 
 Finish It Up Friday

Post Script:  The sun was streaming through a west window yesterday, and it enabled me to capture some more details of the quilting: