Bloggers' Quilt Festival - Trellis Crossroads

Hello and welcome. I'm Wendy and this is my second entry in the Bloggers' Quilt Festival. This is my Trellis Crossroads quilt that I finished a few weeks ago. I'm entering it into the Home Machine Quilted category. 

Trellis Crossroads

I love bright colours, and I've used plenty of them my Trellis Crossroads quilt.  I started this quilt to try out the Trellis Crossroads pattern, but I loved how the bright batiks looked against the navy, so I kept going until I had used up all my batik charm squares.

I used hot pink for the quilting because I knew it would stand out against the navy background. I used my walking foot to quilt diamonds with straight line machine quilting. Once I reached the edges of the quilt I changed to straight lines radiating out to the four corners.

I added a little bit of hand quilting in the centre with a thicker thread as an accent.

This quilt is quite small - just 38" x 38". It's now hanging on the wall in the hall way of our home, and looks very welcoming when visitors come to the door.

You can read more about this quilt in my earlier post here. And you can see my other entry in the Bloggers Quilt Festival here - my Redwork Christmas.

Thank you for visiting.

Trellis Crossroads mini is finished

I'm happy to say that my Trellis Crossroads mini quilt is finished and ready to be hung in the hallway.

Trellis Crossroads in Batiks

This quilt started out because I'd seen other people making Trellis Crossroads blocks for hive challenges and I thought they looked interesting. I just wanted to try one of these blocks so I got hold of the book Modern Bee by Lindsay Connor.  Of course, once I started I wanted to keep to going and ended up making more.

I had a charm pack of bright batiks that I'd had for a while and some navy batik to go with them, so I worked out how many blocks I could make, and just kept going until I had used up all the charm squares. You can read more about my process in my earlier post here.

Machine and Hand quilting combined

At first I intended to straight line machine quilt this quilt with a walking foot. But then I realised that the points didn't meet perfectly on all the blocks, and I thought I could work around that better with hand quilting. I like to hand quilt with a thick thread and a large needle, but I had great difficulty getting the needle through these batiks.

That caused me to rethink the machine quilting option and this quilt has ended up a combination of both methods. I used two different types of bright pink thread for the quilting. The hand quilting thread was a Rayon called "Razzle" by Wonderfil. The machine quilting thread was "Polyneon" by Madeira.

The back with sleeves at the top and bottom.

I put two sleeves on the back so I can insert some 8mm dowling into the top and bottom and hang it on the wall. I like to put dowling in the bottom too because it keeps the quilt hanging nicely.

This is why I had so many ends to darn in on the machine quilting

The facts:
Pattern: Trellis Crossroads from the book Modern Bee by Lindsay Connor
Fabrics: all batiks
Size: 38" x 38"

Spring has sprung

Daylight savings has started, and the temperatures are starting to rise. It's school holidays here so I dragged my two teenage sons to the Wellington Botanic Gardens this morning. It's a perfect day here - hardly any breeze at all (which doesn't happen very often at all in a city known as 'Windy Wellington').

Lady Norwood Rose Garden

Here's some photos of the tulips first.

Tulips grow really well in Wellington

We stopped briefly to look at the duck pond. There were some tiny ducklings there, but I couldn't get a photo because they stayed over the other side.

the Rhododendron trees were lovely too.

Then we walked over the hill to the rose gardens, begonia house and cafe.

The views of the harbour and city are great.

This is a Kowhai tree, a New Zealand native. Kowhai is the Maori word for yellow and you can see why.

Kowhai tree

We had morning tea in the cafe attached to the Begonia House.

the cafe is on the left of the picture

I'm just trying to get some good photos of my Trellis Crossroads quilt before I write a post about it.  I took a couple of quick photos at the gardens while my sons quietly died of shame. Here's one.

Trellis Crossroads - my latest finish.

Thank you for all the 'get well' messages. The antibiotics worked a treat, but I now have asthma which is very unusual for me. I'm on inhalers, so hopefully it will die down soon. I hope you're having nice weather wherever you are.

A progress report

I've been working on quite a few different projects over the last week. On the quilting side I've finished the machine quilting on my Trellis Crossroads batik quilt, and only have to put on the binding, sleeves and label now. I love how this quilt looks, but I will not be working with batiks again in the near future. Hand quilting was nearly impossible, and even machine quilting was difficult because the fabric is quite slippery. Anyway, I'm very happy with how it looks.

I don't know if this qualifies as match stick quilting or not. My lines are 0.5" and 0.75" apart. I quilted out from the central diamond, and then out to the edges.

I had two people tell me to darn the ends in, so I did that. Is that what everyone else does, or do you just cut them off close to the quilt? I'd be interested to know.

I'm surprised at how long it took to machine quilt using this method. My friend Jo used Free Motion stipple quilting on a whole quilt and it only took her one hour. This quilt is only 40" by 40" and it took quite a few hours for the machine quilting.

On Saturday I attended the first Needlelace lesson, and as expected, made minimal progress.

Yes, this is two hours work, but I did get instructions on how to make all of the middle flower before the next lesson in a month's time, and how to prepare the base for another flower. Since Saturday morning I've done a bit more:

two rows of button hole stitch on the outer ring

My eyes do get tired doing this, so I've been swapping to my Northern Expressions Needlework Celtic Snow piece when that happens:

Celtic Snow by Northern Expressions Needlework

Yes, both of these pieces are on the same lovely hand dyed linen. I ordered it for the Celtic Snow, and found I had enough left over for the Needlelace. The threads are light for one and dark for the other, so the fact that I've just the same linen will hardly be noticeable when they are finished.

I hope you have a good week and get lots done. School holidays start next week for us and I will be driving my boys to study tutorials and cricket coaching, so I don't expect to get a lot done then.