Quilt Photos

I spent some time this weekend setting up a place outside to hang up quilts for photographing. I've had three finishes to show for some time now, and have just now gotten it together enough to actually have photos to show. I like to get my quilt photos outside for  better lighting, but I had to contend with wind, bright sunshine and cold today anyway. It's never ideal, but it is still a set-up.  Mr. KQ was very agreeable with helping me, so that was a bonus.

Diagonal Hearts by Ilene Atkins

So I'm showing today the quilt which I think might be my best one so far, certainly it's my own favourite so far.  I just love how this one turned out. It was nearly a right-off, but I managed to save it from disaster!

I didn't really know what I was doing with tension on the backing when I did the quilt sandwich for this one. So when I laid down the diagonal quilt lines along those rows of hearts, I had a lot of puckers on the back. At the time, I didn't know how to fix it, and I became discouraged and put it away. That was about 5 years ago! I make a better quilt sandwich now, by the way!

In this year's finishing frenzy, I decided this summer to pull it out and face whatever music there was to be faced. I thought it was worth salvaging, and figured I now had enough experience to work out any kinks. I painstakingly took out a lot of that quilting, worked in all the puckers, and then finished up with what I had started. It's okay as long as you don't look too closely at the back!

Diagonal Hearts, detail by Ilene Atkins

I wrote about this quilt previously, here, and here. In case you are wondering, I needle turn appliqued two hearts on every block, then joined all the blocks together. Then I appliqued a heart on each intersection. This is one of my red and denim quilts, six I think so far.

When I first started to do my quilting, I did a lot of straight lines with my walking foot, and filled in with stippling, so that's what I continued with. I've branched out from stippling since then, so I added some free-motion hearts in the spaces between the hearts.

This quilt has been a long time from start to finish, and I'm so glad it's now on the finish list. I hope you like it, too.