Reflections quilt is finished

I sewed the quilt label onto the back of the quilt in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve as the final task to completion. So I did complete it in 2009. It wasn’t particularly my goal to finish in the old year, but it was a nice way to close the quilting year for me.

Looking back I see that I started the work on this quilt in mid August 2009. It has been more than 4 months in the making, which is the longest of any of my pieces to date – I think even longer than my CHF piece, although I spent more of my free time working on that piece. However it has been time well spent. I have learned a number of valuable lessons and have produced a finished piece that I believe has pushed out the boundaries of what I can achieve. It has been a valuable step on the road to finding my own creative voice.

I am very pleased with the way the wall hanging turned out. It is how I imagined it to be in my mind’s eye. It is also a piece that reflects my personal style, which I think I am becoming more clear about as the course progresses. I like the more abstract, geometric type of design. Although I like looking at figurative artwork, it is not something that appeals to me from the personal design and creation aspect. I am happy that I managed to find a theme that is based on natural world (as the assessment brief stated), but that I have been able to use to fit my own style.

I used a new to me technique for binding the quilt and have found a new and valuable technique to add to my tool box. I was particularly pleased to have learnt this technique, because it produces a good sturdy edge (as Marie my tutor had told me) and allows one to achieve an excellent finish without having the additional element of a binding in the design. With my wall hanging I don’t feel that a traditional binding would have been an appropriate finishing for the quilt. I found a really useful tutorial on this technique by Brenda Gael Smith over at Serendipity Patchwork and Quilting. A big thank you to Brenda for her generous sharing of experience.

Please take the time to look at some more images of my quilt in the gallery. I wrote a little about the process of creating the quilt there too.