Organic Chemistry Quilt is FINISHED!

After 2 years of working on and off of this (mostly off), I am so happy to say that my Organic Chemistry Quilt is done!!!

I started this originally as part of the Modern Quilt Guild's challenge, which had a theme of "organic".  After hand embroidering the first few blocks, it quickly became obvious that I wasn't going to get it done in the time period allotted.  I had time to stitch the blocks during  a cross-country road trip 2 summers ago, and even stitched together the back that same summer.  Then, I put it away and it sat for a very long time...

I think it sat for 2 reasons... the finished quilt wasn't as nice as I had envisioned in my mind's eye.  It's still not really a "favorite" quilt, but I love the concept of it, and wanted to see it realized.  I love geeky science quilts!  The other reason was that I had no idea how to quilt it.  In the end, I pretty much just closed my eyes and started quilting it, hoping for the best.  The hexagon quilting too    f o r e v e r   , but I'm glad I endured and got it done!  I was thinking about adding some free motion quilting in addition, but decided that I like the "simplicity" (ha!), or clean lines of the hexagonal quilting, and left it alone. The back is pieced together from all of the various fabrics that I used to make the hexagons and pentagons on the molecules.

It's 60 by 75 inches.  Each embroidered square is backed by muslin to keep the stitches from showing through the fabric, so it's a thick heavy quilt as well.  I think if I added up all of the time I spent hand embroidering each block, researching the chemicals, and quilting this beast, I probably put more time into this quilt than any other.  Whew!

Shanna and Melissa's "A Lovely Year of Finishes" helped motivate me to finish it, but I'm also getting it done with just a few days to spare to enter in our upcoming Krazy Horse Quilters' Quilt show!!  If you're in town May 4-5th, come see us!!

WIP Wed: Honeycomb / Hexagon Machine Quilting Tutorial

I'm about a third done quilting my Organic Chemistry Quilt.  I decided to do a simple grid all over the quilt, but also wanted to use hexagons on it.  After looking all over the Internet for ideas, and pretty much coming up with nothing, I decided to create my own.

One great thing about this quilting design is that just about anyone can do it with a walking foot.  All I did is to use the same cereal box template that I used to make the appliqued chemical hexagons, and used a plastic pot scrubber (my makeshift "Hera marker") to trace the outline of the next shape to stitch on.

Hopefully this give you an idea of how I am quilting it.  I tried to use chalk marker at first, but the white is almost impossible to see on such a light background, and the few I did in a peach colored chalk didn't easily "erase" with water or a lint roller.  I've had colored tailor chalk stain previous quilts, so immediately stopped using it.  This "Hera marker" leaves a crease that lasts just long enough to guide my stitches over!

It'll take a while to do this, but I find that I really really like this design.  I bet it'd be super easy on a long arm machine too.

Of course now that the design is taking shape, I may not be able to resist free motion quilting inside some of those "empty" hexagons ;-).