Visions of God-The Quilt

I'm so excited to have finished this project!  I get to cross if off my UFO list which is soooo satisfying, and I think it really turned out well.  I laid out all the blocks, some of which were shown here, on my design wall (a really optimistic description as anyone who has ever seen my quilting room knows) and tried to arrange them in a pleasing fashion.  Instead of putting sashing between each block, I decided to group them so that the sashing made a cross shape.  I think that gives some overall interest to the layout, and prevents the blocks from feeling too broken up.

The parish associate told me that the quilt was going to be used as an altar cloth for the casual evening service at our church.  I was worried that it might be too puffy with regular batting since I didn't intend to put much quilting on it, so I decided to put medium weight Pellon interfacing inside instead of batting.  In retrospect I definitely would recommend using flannel or something if you don't want to use batting because the interfacing was pretty stiff, not very drapy, and so flat that every little wrinkle and pucker showed up. Luckily, after I washed it the whole thing softened up a little bit.  I used spray baste to adhere the interfacing to the batting and the top to the interfacing and then quilted the top 1/4 inch in from the edges of the blocks and sashing.  The back is just solid green, another thing I won't repeat; the solid shows every little spot and when some fraycheck (awesome stuff btw) seeped through to the back of the quilt it left an ugly spot that wouldn't come out on the back even though you can't see it at all on the front.

I used a standard binding, but sewed it on starting from the back, then flipped it around and top-stitched it down on the front.

I hope the people at the church like it!

Visions of God, 2011, 63"x 63"