Millefiori - La Tarantella - the Quilt

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It's about time! I finished several rosettes, now it's time to put them together

 

This is the whole middle part, even if not all rosettes are sewn together. It makes no sense to do it now.


bottom, right corner:


corner bottom left:


The whole quilt at the beginning of March 2020. Now you can already see the whole outer edge:


Status at the beginning of March 2020:

 

upper left corner:

 

June 2020:

 


September 2020:

 

October 2020:

Now all segments were done, only one last triangle had to be sewn to one last rosette:

 

and it went on and on - I added one finished segment after the other to that last rosette:


Well - only the last big segment in the upper left corner is missing - but I'm going back to my husband for 2 months. The top is too bulky and too heavy to take it with me on the train. The quilt will have to wait until Christmas.

Of course, in the meantime I started to think about how I want to design the border. Pinterest has enough examples for the variations:
- cut hard and attach the binding directly
- cut hard, add one or more borders, then the binding
- let the outer rosettes 'spread out' into the border. Hm. That sounds good and looks good on La Passacaglia - but La Tarantella has almost only very large (half) rosettes on the outside - if I extend those into the border, the quilt will be huge. A friend told me that instead of the big half rosette I can spread only the inner circle into the border. Hm. That looks really good.


What to do? Actually I'm sick of Millefiori. Easter 2019 until October 2020 - I can't see EPP anymore!
I think I will cut hard, sew a border of 3-4 inch (maybe in a dark blue?) and then cut the binding of all the leftover bits and pieces of my 30 fabrics.

HOW I can do this? Wendy has described the process in detail on her blog:

https://wendysquiltsandmore.blogspot.com/2020/04/ballet-with-kaffe-how-i-attached-borders.html

 

Addendum: I managed to put the top together completely before departure:


Dezember 2020: Now all the papers had to come out. 2,931 pieces. I was dreading it, but it was surprisingly easy! This is how the top looks from behind, the outermost row stayed in until the end to stabilize the whole wobbly thing.


Than I marked the sewline with ruler and pencil, put the border on and adjusted it with pins.


The border is on and I was ready to cut the surplus seamallowances.


Finally!  Top with border:


This turned out pretty well - I was afraid I would cut off all the peeky tips right at the border. But it worked out well for most of them.
So now to quilt. Variegated thread? Nah, the quilt is colorful enough. A plain white or light gray? Still too intense. So monifilament it is.


And this is where the nightmare began: as usual, I basted the top to the cotton batting with Odif 505. But when I started with freemotion-quilting, there was permanent yarn tangle at the back. Could it be that my nylon thread is too old? Harriet Hargrave once mentioned something like that. So straight-line quilting. Great. I wanted to quilt atound the circles so I had to squeeze the quilt through the sewing machine what felt like 1,001 times.
And somehow the top is totally unstable. The seams are holding all right, but even with spray adhesive, the top is completely wobbly. There have been oodles of wrinkle distortions. Thank God the circles never overlap, but the result looks bad enough as it is, in some places anyway.
For a millefiori, hand quilting or longarm is probably best.


But as they say: Finished is better than perfect.

The motto for this quilt!  It was finished and washed on 12/21/20 (I started it Easter 2019).

 

Where is the champagne?

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