I’m finally starting to get a few finishes under my belt and one which I am very pleased to have finally finished is the Exploding Heart quilt, a design by Slice of Pi. This is a quilt for a happy young couple who finally got married in May after many delays due to covid. Yes I’m about six months late but I didn’t get the colour scheme until April…and I’m not very good without a deadline!

Last time I think I shared my progress on this particular project I had just finished piecing it, it was sandwiched and I was trying to decide how to quilt it…

I asked for suggestions on the UKQU facebook page and took on board a couple of comments and ideas, in particular that an all over meandering design might detract from the cream heart outline. I had found what I thought was a lovely free-motion quilting design of hearts and loops on Etsy, it was only about £2.50, but when I struggled to download it I found out that it was actually for computerised long arm machines! The shop owner kindly sent the design as a pdf so I could use it. Whilst I didn’t copy it it did give me a general pattern of hearts and loops.

I started in the middle with a heart and quilted the central heart in sage green with a meandering mix of hearts and loops. I then used cream to quilt just inside both edges of the cream heart. The rest of the quilt was then quilted in a very pale green. The colour changes worked well as the quilting doesn’t stand out too much, I used cream thread throughout underneath as the backing is a cream with tiny hearts on.

.During my visit to the Knitting and Stitching show I picked up some sage green fabric with tiny spots on which blended in nicely for the binding. I embroidered a label with the couples initials and the date and my initials at the bottom.

I’m really pleased with this quilt, it’s the biggest quilt I’ve quilted on a machine so far, it’s 72″ square. It’s also the first one I think I’ve quilted on this machine, it’s a memorycraft Janome with a wider stitching throat and it does make a huge difference when I’m trying to control 36″ quilt to the right of the machine needle.

I’m particularly pleased with the effect of the ‘scrappy’ background, the pattern was for a plain background but I used about five or six different fabrics in shades of cream and off white. Visually I think it’s a very effective pattern and the instructions are certainly easy to follow…it just took longer than I anticipated with all those half and quarter square tringles!

Hopefully the bride and groom will love it too.