This is why I haven’t even touched the computer in nearly a month. Sometimes you just get so wrapped up in a quilting project that you just can’t tear yourself away. During the past month, my poor hubby has even had to make his own dinner some nights. It’s a good thing that he understands my obession.
If you haven’t read the story behind this quilt, check out my post “The Next Challenge”. Each of the blocks for the “Flying Dove” quilt require 16 half square triangles, so a total of 896 for the queen-sized quilt. The hard part is the majority of them were made from my deceased sister’s scraps which were too small to use the handy shortcut that makes them 8 at a time. I did have to add some fabric from my own scraps and stash as well as a few fat quarters, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but still very time consuming. But the finished product was worth all the work.
This is a photo of all the pieces ready to be assembled.
And this is the finished quilt:
The sad thing is when I hung it on the wall to photograph it, I noticed in the lower right hand quadrant, that in two blocks I have the half-square triangles in the center of the block instead of the outside! I was devastated because it would be impossible to take it apart and redo those two blocks to fix it especially because I mitered the borders. I can’t believe this got past me since I carefully inspected each block multiple times and had them all hung on the wall to make sure everything looked good and didn’t have identical pieces of the fabric right next to each other. The only excuse I can think of is I was crosseyed from trying to get the half-square triangles all pointing in the right direction.
oneblockwonderwoman 
Wow; that’s a lot of those little buggers!!! I’ve seen them used in this quantity, but not by me! Bonnie Hunter, QUILTVILLE.BLOGSPOT.COM uses them as a “leader-ender” project, building them over the course of a year. My favorite video blogger “GourmetQuilter.wordpress.com” has been making “BONUS” HST when she makes other things, like snowball blocks. But of course, you want what you want when you need it, so you just have to make them. The quilt is beautiful, and will be a lasting tribute. Is this going to your nephew?? I would not have “spotted” the 2 blocks if you had not pointed them out. Humble blocks I think. From what I could see of the long arm quilting it looks great!! That is a whole lot of quilt for a month! Nice job and beautiful.
Thanks for coming by. This is for my great-nephew who is 17. This is the second quilt that I’ve done on the long arm. I got the brilliant idea of cutting out a bird outline from template plastic, safety pinning it to the center of the blocks and just roughly following it with my quilting machine. Some of them actually came out looking like doves, some like crows and some have double chins….and I never knew birds had chins!! Overall, from 50 paces it looks good. LOL!
Looks great, and that was genius way to use a template. I’m still trying to get along with my “pounce” products and stencils. 🙂
The problem I have with the pounce deal is I never have the perfect stencil and the chalk is a little hard to see on the long arm. Of course I DID sew the plastic template to the quilt a couple of times. LOL!
It looks amazing, and like a true labor of love!
Thanks for commenting. It really was a labor of love, but having a couple of pieces going the wrong way really bothers me. I have to get better at saying “Done & Gifted is better than perfect” like you did for your oops moment. 🙂