Olympics Quilt

 

This is the quilt that has been hoarding my safety pins for DECADES. Which isn't a big deal since the new safety pins I bought were curved and I like those much better.

In my last post, I told you the quilt was started in 2007, but I looked on my old blog, and it told the story of the quilt. Here's what I said at the time.

Olympics Quilt Story

I always mean to tell the story of a quilt when I finish it, but I generally tell it earlier, while I am procrastinating finishing it. So let me tell you about the Olympics quilt. I started it in 2002. Even though I made my first quilt in 1994, and started the denim circles one then, the quilting police succeeded in making me give up quilting (that and a baby to raise and a career to advance). I took up quilting again in 2002, by taking some quilt classes. So this quilt was a learning quilt for me.

There was a pattern on the internet, affiliated with another quilting newsgroup, and I felt guilty about looking at some other newsgroups stuff, but I did, and I wound up subscribing to that newsgroup. I wound up unsubscribing only because I couldn't handle two very chatty newsgroups at one time. Anyway, the designer made options to make the quilt in two colors or in four (plus the background), and of course I wanted four.

The color selection was probably easy, because I like these bright primary colors, and I like the subtle pattern of the fabric. And I was very very afraid of colors then. I probably asked everyone I knew if those primary colors matched each other!

The pattern was very beginner friendly. It told you in detail how to cut the fabric, and held my hand through each step. I learned how to use squares to make a snowball block. I was afraid of making mistakes, so I did not cut off the excess. No extra HSTs in this quilt! I even learned how to do partial piecing. Oops, I don't remember what that is called. You piece part of a seam, and don't put it down all the way until you have sewn the rest of the pieces in. There was a panic when the designer dropped my hand and said arrange the blocks according to the picture. I was so scared that I didn't even try different layouts.

I was watching the winter Olympics at the time I made the quilt, and when the top was pieced, I realized that my color circles seemed very much like the Olympics rings. I had big ambitions of doing some bluework or quilting of Olympic motifs in the solid black spaces in the snowball blocks. I spent a lot of time at libraries and on the internet copying sports figures.

I needed the quilt to be bigger, so I added a WIDE border. I also made a nice pieced border - another first! - but I didn't have enough fabric to go all the way around, so it is only on one side.

I do like the quilt, but it feels like forced, like a mother who is required to love her own child. I am now debating whether to still put on those sports figures, by free motion quilting on the machine. I don't have enough for every block, but I think I should do it for practice. I keep wavering back and forth between doing something quick just to get it done, and taking my time to make it as good as I can. The second set of squiggly lines look okay, but not good. The first set has already been ripped out, and I'm thinking that I might be able to take them out if I do the motif quilting. For someone who doesn't often take out quilting stitches, I'm being very generous with the seam ripper on this one!

2022 Update

The photos on the blog show that indeed there were a lot of random things added to help make the bed as flat as possible. Now that I have a flatbed, the quilting is much easier, although the thread is breaking from time to time.

The photo above shows the last motif that was left on the quilt, halfway done. I have finished it. I decided to stitch in the ditch around all the big black squares and add some simple quilting in the small black squares. I was originally quilting in the colored rings but that is hard to do on a domestic machine with the bulky seams and it is hard to keep track of what direction I am going when I do that.

 

I took the photos quickly on my porch. I've already quilted a bunch of the areas which is why some of the safety pins are gone. You can see that there is a big blue border and then a big black border around the whole quilt in addition to the row of chain at the top of the quilt. I don't really like the way the borders look and will probably be cutting most of them off. Right now, I think I will just slice off part of the blue and not add anything else. Having a skinnier blue border would look good., but I don't know what to do about the pieced border.