It’s happy dance time as I have finally finished my Coming Home quilt! I started this quilt back in January 2019, a looong time ago! It was a block of the month quilt by Sarah Fielke, it’s the second Sarah Fielke quilt I’ve made, the first one being the Down the Rabbit Hole quilt….

…as you can see that was a pretty big quilt, it lives on our bed, I still love it.

Sarah’s quilts usually have a fair amount of needle-turn applique, that’s actually one reason why I first decided to make the Down the Rabbit Hole one, I wanted to learn how to do it properly. I also like the medallion style design of these quilts.

As soon as I heard about the Coming Home quilt, I wanted to make it, I particularly liked the border of houses on the DTRH quilt, so a quilt full of houses sounded pretty good to me. I chose a palette of teal, blue and peach mainly, started off with fabrics from my stash which I then added to.

I thoroughly enjoyed making the Coming Home quilt, even if there were an awful lot of windows to stitch! I changed the outer border, partly because it looked a bit too busy for me, and partly because I didn’t want quite such a big quilt. This one is about 80″ square, which is big enough for us.

It was still too big for me to comfortably quilt on my domestic sewing machine, particularly as I didn’t just want an all over design. There aren’t many long arm quilters here in the UK that are prepared to custom quilt, I eventually found Althea of Harrogate Quilting Studio who agreed to do what I would call a semi custom quilting. She used a lovely leafy design for the middle, a feather border for the wide house border and a twirl within each triangle on the outer border

I’m really pleased with the quilting, I’m so glad I persuaded Althea to quilt it, it was somewhat out of her comfort zone but she did a wonderful job. It’s not easy to photograph the quilting but you can just make out the different areas on this photo of the quilt from the back…

I bound it with a lovely soft, dark blue fabric by Lewis and Irene, it blends in perfectly. I hand stitched the binding on which took a couple of evenings but I think the finish is worth it on a special quilt.

All that was left was a label. I decided to embroider the quilt details directly onto the back of the quilt, I usually do it this way, I like using an element of the quilting to stitch the label on. This time I used the fan shape on one of the corners, I kept it simple with just the quilt name, my initials and the date I finished it. I used light grey embroidery thread and chain stitch.

I’ve just decorated our spare bedroom and it looks rather nice in there. I still need to paint the chests of drawers though in case you’re wondering 🙂