Now Showing: "Heart Mania"

Since I'm hopelessly unoriginal at naming quilts I'm warming to the idea of having the recipient name their quilt.  It worked for my husband's quilt.  My daughter came up with "Heart Mania" for her quilt.  Here it is, finally!

 The 6" heart blocks are the "Heartfelt" paper piecing pattern by Cindi Edgerton. The setting, with 3" borders on two sides of each block, is mine. The cable quilting motif in the middle part of the quilt is "Avalon" from Quiltmaker's "Quilting Motifs Volume 1". The motif on the outside border is mine.

I finished sewing the binding to the back around 1 am on Tuesday.  I should have stopped earlier and finished on Wednesday, but I was so close to being done it was hard to quit.   It was even harder to get up on time and get the kids' lunches packed and everyone off to school on time in the morning!   However I got an "extra squeezy" hug from my daughter after she woke up and found herself tucked under her new quilt, so it was worth it.

On Monday night as I was attaching the binding I was pondering how astounding it was that a 26" square of fabric produced enough bias binding to go around the whole quilt.  I use the bias tube method to make binding.  I have a lovely laminated "cheat sheet" (Quilter's Strip Ticket from Lamb Art Press) with instructions and diagrams on one side and charts listing what size square of fabric I need start with to make various lengths of various widths.  I love that cheat sheet and was rather dismayed when it failed me this time!  Three quarters of the way around the quilt I realized the binding strip would be about 20 inches too short.

It turns out that the chart only works when you put in the right numbers at the beginning...go figure!   I got exactly as many inches of binding out of my 26" square as the chart said I would.  My quilt is 308" around, not the 288" that I looked up in the chart.  Luckily I had enough scrap left over to piece together an extra 20".

Now I'm off to ponder what I will make next.  I can play with other projects guilt-free now that "Heart Mania" is done and delivered.  I'm thinking about a Christmas zigzag table runner for my coffee table...