Girt By Sea Quilt Progress

If a blog post could be summed up in one action, it would be me pumping my fists with a loud “Yeah, baby!” And that’s because I got all caught up on my Girt By Sea quilt, making three borders in one month. Amidst flu-ridden kids (and one’s resulting ear infection) that kept me on nursemaid duty for almost two weeks.

Although, there are a couple of caveats to my achievement… I had already interfaced and cut my circles for the applique back in May at Modern Makers Retreat. And then on the first weekend of August, I was away on a quilty retreat with friends, where I not only gunned my way through a lot of work sewing to get that out of the way for the month, but also pieced all my half-square triangles for the windmills and a very sweet friend trimmed about half of them for me.

Still, the fact remains that regardless of what life threw at me this month, I caught up. And I am proud of that fact!

So, the quick recap of my Girty is that I’m using all Carolyn Friedlander fabrics, to finally put my giant pile of her fabric to use, together with Kona Snow. The other key stat for this quilt, to state the bleeding obvious, is that I’m doing it in colour order. There’s the Red (orange) Centre, then the golden yellow canola fields from my childhood road trips, followed by yellow green wattle (or are they bindis?!), and now the dark greens of hazy mountains in the distance.

I’m mixing the pattern up a little bit, playing with fabric placement. The pattern for the centre medallion, for example, has three thin strips around the English paper pieced star – background, print, background. I went with background, print, print for mine.

The applique round is also a bit different, as I didn’t use any leaf shapes, and I played with overlapping some larger and smaller circles. I used the 2″ and 3″ circles on the AccuQuilt Circle die to cut these, which was an awesome way to get perfect circles! My method was:

1) Apply the interfacing to my fabric and cut into the appropriate size of squares
2) Cut out the circles by borrowing Alison’s Circle die (it’s awesome when friends have different dies from your’s!)
3) Roughly space each cluster evenly around the border strips and fuse to the background fabric.
4) Chose one Aurifil green thread – 2800 – and use my darning/FMQ machine foot to sew around the exposed edge of each circle three times.

Quick and easy and done!

My log cabins came together really quickly, once I had chosen my fabric, that is… I agonised over how to equally distribute the different shades of greens! I wanted to have two different sets of greens – one more green-teal and one more blue-teal. But once that was done, they sewed up quickly thanks to the magic that is chain piecing – I sewed one set of teals at a time, like the tip I gave in my post at the start of this round of the QAL.

Next up will be the deep blue waves, and the final round will be the pink and purple coral of the Great Barrier Reef. I’m contemplating what to do with my blue Drunkards Path waves – possibly alternating the fabric placement in each block so that one has a white quarter-circle and the next has it blue. Or perhaps mixing the fabrics up so that all the quarter-circles are blue, with the occasional light blue used instead of the white. We shall see what emerges!

And then there’s the final border and the fact that I would love to get some of the coral pinks from Gleaned into this quilt… it ships in January though, so I’ll have to be patient if I decide to wait! Sigh!

If you haven’t heard of, or started, the Girt By Sea quilt pattern and quilt along, you can join in at any time! This is the kind of quilt along where you just need to share your progress along the way, whatever that progress might be, to win one of the awesome monthly prizes. And the major prizes are pretty amazing – an AccuQuilt GO! for an Australian resident, and a Liberty club subscription + patterns for an international winner. See it all here. In the meantime, on to Emma’s Drunkard Sea…