It was a long, long time ago when I decided to make an Aerial Grove Quilt. I fell in love with this pattern by Carolyn Friedlander from her book - Savour Each Stitch back in October 2016. I was smitten - I knew after reading the book from cover to cover that this was a quilt that I wanted to make for myself.
First part was getting to choose all the fabrics I was going to use for my Needle turn "squircles". I went through my Liberty fabric stash and pulled out all the ones that made me so happy in a Rainbow colour way. Cutting up this many Liberty squares actually took a while - to cut, press and then fold back up all these fabrics. It also made a wonderfully beautiful mess in my sewing room.
Next up was deciding what fabrics I was going to use for the backgrounds of this quilt. I wanted the quilt to go on our Bed, so although I had picked some very girly Liberty fabrics I then decided to try to make it more something also that my hubby would love on the bed too. As a big lover of Denim and Chambray fabrics I had the perfect variety of lots of different prints and types of these Denims and Chambray's left from projects that I had already made. So, so far - I used the Liberty fabrics from my stash and the Denims/Chambray's also came from what I already had.
Some of the Denims and Chambray's I used are below
Gertrude Made Essentials - Texas Denim
Gertrude Made Essentials - Chambray
I then spent the next year hand sewing all the squircles into place. The pieces even came on our Family Cruise in December 2017 to Vanuatu. I had already basted down the Liberty squircles so this made the strips very portable and easy to take with me places when I had a chance to stitch.
Early in 2018 I had finally finished the hand sewing of all those squircles and began to piece together the strips and background pieces of Denims and Chambray's.
I began to build the quilt out using all the pieces of the Denims and Chambray's I had chosen to use. I was aiming for this to be quite large and worked it up to be 2.2m x 2.2m so big enough for our Queen size bed. I knew very early on that I was going to Hand quilt this quilt. So I also cut the pieces for the blocks with this in mind so that I could use lots of smaller blocks to create the hand quilting design rather than leaving fabric pieces in larger squares and rectangles. In between the Denims and Chambray's I placed a few background blocks in Liberty fabrics to draw cohesion from the Liberty squircles that were in the centre.
Next I sent the Quilt off to my Long Arm Quilter. Because I knew this was a project that was going to take me a while to work on I had the quilt Basted. This would save me not only basting such a large Quilt myself but then I would not have to deal with the weight of the number of pins I knew this quilt would need for hand quilting.
The next task was to collect up all the Thread I was going to use for the Hand quilting - this was the easy part - Aurifil 12wt. I chose about 8 different blue 12wt Thread colours and then matched each the fabrics to one of these colours so that I knew which fabric would be matching to which colour thread.
With all my tools ready for Hand quilting - I then started what I knew would be a long and rewarding process. Over the years I have hand quilted many quilts - I love hand quilting, I find it relaxing and such a worthwhile way to add such a beautiful texture and feel to your quilt.
If you have wanted to give hand quilting a go or already love this part of quilting and would like some extra tips - here is a Blog post I wrote all about - My Favourite Hand Quilting Tools. Here you will find some helpful tips and tricks.
I used a variety of different Masking tapes - 1/4in, 1/2in and 1inch tapes to help create the spaced lines which went horizontally, vertically or diagonally randomly throughout each background block.
Once I could see the finish line almost in sight for all the hand quilting, I then went back to my Liberty stash and found some Binding that would go perfectly for that finishing touch to the quilt.
Aren't Binding Babies ever so cute - always the perfect way to store your Bindings and so very helpful when it comes time to sew the Binding onto your Quilt.
The Backing I choose to use for the Quilt - well that took a long time to decide what to go with. My first initial though was that I wanted to use Liberty. I knew that was an extravagant way to use this fabric and it was for the backing so I tried to work through other options. I looked at Widebacks, lots of different Chambray's and Denim options, I tried looking at yardage of regular Quilting cottons that I thought might work. It wasn't working for me. I had spied this Liberty Betsy in Denim from Ava and Neve and then just could get this out of my head to use this. While it certainly was a luxury - I figured that this was going to be our quilt, all the fabric for the top had come from my stash and mostly I knew I would have regretted not using it.
Within the first 10 seconds of opening up the package of the yardage of this Betsy I knew I had made the right decision. This Liberty was going to hand quilt up a dream, be so soft and have a much lighter weight to the overall quilt - especially as I had used the Denims and Chambray's on the front which are a little heavier than regular quilting cottons. I was in love!
So all in all this quilt took about 2 years to make from beginning to end. Certainly a wonderful journey in hand sewing and hand quilting.
Happy Quilting
Jemima x
