A couple of weeks ago, “my” quilt circle had its regular meeting, at which many of us used instructions shared by Christa Watson, a local quilter, to make chevron quilts. The original instructions used 5″ blocks, but I decided to make a miniature, so I ended up with 1.5″ blocks instead, and an overall size of 14.25″ x 17.75″. I used a variety of batiks in the pink/violet range, since I had them handy, and set them into a black background. In playing with the resulting blocks, I decided I really preferred the herringbone layout, instead of the chevrons, so that’s what I made. After carefully sewing several rows together backwards and having to redo them, of course. 😉
I added a narrow black border and did all of the machine quilting free-motion without my usual stitch regulator, just for practice. Who knew that straight lines were so tricky to do? But I did want to use straight lines to emphasize the piecing, so that’s what I did. The border is quilted in a Greek-key motif, and then I inserted piping made from four of the fabrics of the main portion of the quilt between that border and the binding. It’s really hard to see the quilting on the black fabric, of course, but if you enlarge the photo at the right, you can quite clearly see a white hair — the contribution from Bisou, our cocker spaniel. LOL!
