Kitchen Windows Quilt: A finish!

The Kitchen Windows Quilt is finally, finally finished! I started sewing about 4.5 years ago, and this was the first quilt I ever began, over three years ago.

It got put on the back burner so many times for so many reasons — I fell out of love with the fabrics, I got interested in other projects, my inexperienced and inaccurate piecing caused all kinds of troubles that I didn't want to deal with, and so on and so on.

 

This year, the STLMQG has been doing a project called the War on Works in Progress (WOW), and this quilt was at the top of my list. I was determined to finally finish it. About a year ago, I decided to switch out the original sashing I'd chosen (the green that made its way onto the back instead), and then it was just a matter of making it a priority.

I had to cheat A LOT to get these blocks to work, so don't look too close. Because my initial piecing (and, I suspect, my initial cutting) was so bad, the blocks finished at lots of different sizes (if you look closely, you'll notice that the width of the chocolate brown sashing is very inconsistent. I couldn't bring myself to rip it all out, so instead I cheated with the linen sashing and cut each piece individually so the final blocks would be the correct size.

When it came time to quilt it, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to finally try my hand at free-motion quilting. I knew I wasn't planning to give this quilt away because it already had so many problems, so I figured there wasn't much to lose if I messed up. I quilted in an allover loopy meander using cream thread. I'm pleased with the overall effect, and I think it definitely helped to hide some of the flaws, but it's not perfect by any means. Also, I ended up getting several large puckers in the backing toward the end of the process, but I didn't notice until I was done, and at that point, I didn't have the heart (or the energy) to rip out all the stitches and redo it, so they're staying. Character, right?

It's a bit hard to tell in some of the distance shots (The colors in this quilt were super hard to photograph, FYI. It's actually much cheerier looking in person.), but I actually used two colors to bind it. Half is bound in the aqua dot, and half is bound in the red dot. Just a fun little detail.

Final details: the pattern is the Kitchen Window quilt from Elizabeth Hartman's first book, The Practical Guide to Patchwork. Like all her work, it's a great pattern, and the problems came from my end, not the pattern. The fabrics are all from Cosmo Cricket's Early Bird collection (long out of print), combined with Kona Chocolate and an unidentified linen for the sashing. The green on the back is another unidentified Kona color (sorry, but I bought it four years ago, so you understand). It's so nice to have this one finally finished!

I'm linking up to the Craft Book Sew-Along at Live.Love.Create.