A Graceful Baltimore…Quilting makes it.

A few years ago I saw this quilt kit on one of the FB destaching sites. Its called A Graceful Baltimore by A Graceful Stitch designed by Denise Sheehan.  It caught my eye so I paid $75.00 for it.  Well to my surprise when it came it was a BOM and each part was had a label on it that said $25.00. Then I quickly figured it out and WHO HOO the savings.

I started it shortly after receiving it and  it sat in the evergrowing UFO pile.  This year I figured I’m going to get rid of that pile and I got it finished.  I’m not a big fan of applique but I trudged my way thru it.  I did find that I like the blanket stitch way better than the satin stitch it does not make my fabric pucker. For this quilt the blanket stich gives it that old fashioned look.

I looked at it over all and noticed that there are no 2 blocks identical so that is how I decided to quilt it. When I started to quilt it  on my domestic machine.  I do all my quilting on a Pfaff Expresion.  The 1st applique block the bird on the twig I stippled.   I soon realized that was going to take way too much time to do all of them this way so I started out echoing all the appliqued blocks.

Then  I started to do the piecing blocks.

The blocks that had solid fabric I tried to give them some texture by using different quilting techniques to make them pop.

The last thing that I had to do was the borders so I decided to do feathers on the inner border and use arches and lines for the outer border. Heres a link to a video tutorial that I made for a friend while quilting the borders….Freemotion quilting the borders (click to get to video)

This is what the back looks like out in the sun.

I really enjoyed quiting this one… I think it took me about 30 hours in total to quilt it.