Small Whole Cloth Quilt

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This quilt has been half quilted and pinned to my design wall for longer than I can remember.  The photo metadata says that I started this in May of 2012, and to be honest, I don't even know if I blogged about it.  Maybe?  It was mostly just a chance to practice my FMQ, but somehow I started it, got as far as the second picture in April 2013, and never got back to it.  Last week I decided to go ahead and finish it (it's about 24" square).  I spent a few hours quilting, then squared it up and bound it. I usually use the water-erasable blue markers to mark my quilts (they come out of everything I've ever tried them on), but I used crayola washable markers for this one because the blue was hard to see.  I know they wash out, but I was really scared, because the marker had been on there for sooo long.  Anyway, I soaked the quilt overnight with spray-n-wash and a bit of woolite, and then ran it through the rinse in the washer.  The marker did come out (yay), so I'll consider myself lucky on this one.  You can see all the red marker in the center.

Sorry for the bad colors in this next one, but I wanted to show how I block my quilts.  Most things I make are small enough to fit on my design wall, but I have never in the history of my sewing, managed to make something square.  As a result I always have to block my quilts when they're wet, squaring up to some element in the design that's supposed to be horizontal or vertical.  On this one that has the inner border, I blocked the inner border and the edge (you can see the billions of pins), stretching or mushing in till it lines up with my laser level (red lines).  Sometimes I block before squaring up and sometimes after (sometimes both if my quilt is really misbehaving), it just depends on the project.  (This quilt really is square, the picture is just crooked).

Here's a close-up of the quilting.  It's mostly 100wt silk thread in the center, metallic and polyester 40wt on the borders.  Definitely not perfect, but fun and finished!

Twirling through the Leaves, Shannon Conley, 24 x 24, 2015