Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Chinese Coins with Rabbit Baby Quilt Finished

Spiral quilting is successful. After considering another centered spiral for this quilt, I chose to use concentric circles here. I've done it before. Instructions on how/where I started are at the end of this post from 2015.

Narrow Chinese Coin columns are sashed with solid pastels. A narrow black border and a wide green and yellow striped border frame the quilt. The silhouette of a rabbit in a large floral print on white sits in the bottom right corner.
Chinese Coins with Rabbit baby quilt (CCXIV)

It much easier to start with a gentle quarter circle starting halfway down one side and then echo quilt along each side than to try to echo from a tight corner. When you look closely, it's obviously not marked. I simply eyeballed a width based on the foot. Those wobbles are not visible in the overall photo and will disappear even more as the quilt is washed, used, and loved to pieces.

Concentric quarter circles are quilted starting at the top left corner of the quilt
Chinese Coins with Rabbit
baby quilt (CCXIV) detail

The back is a collection of blues. Not quite as dull as this photo shows. Again, the narrow border was stitched-in-the-ditch first to keep it nice and straight.

The back is a collection of four different blue prints.
Chinese Coins with Rabbit
baby quilt (CCXIV) back

Here's a closeup of the bunny. The large floral print looks like Spring. It was fun to use fabric that is not realistic. {I'm such a stick-in-the-mud, I usually try to match real items with their real colors.}

The folded quilt shows the  of rabbit on the front, portions of the back, and yellow print binding.
Chinese Coins with Rabbit baby quilt (CCXIV)
detail of rabbit and binding

Looking through the binding strips, these yellows worked best. I even pulled some choices from my stash to see if anything worked better but the quilt says, "Enough. Give me a soft, low-key edge, please."


Quilt Details
Size: 41" x 43"
Design: Chinese Coins
Batting: Mountain Mist 100% cotton
Thread: dark and light blue Gutterman 50 wt cotton
Quilting: Stitch in the Ditch and spiral quilting with walking foot

I am still reading St. Clair's The Golden Thread and finished the chapter on Vikings last week. She writes about the longship discovery at Gokstad which I think Kaja visited last year although I can't find her post. She had some great photos.

 Kassia also mentions Ibn Fadlan who I recall from Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead. The title sounds more gruesome than the book really is. Published in the 70's, it mixes Ibn's journals with the story of Beowulf. I remember the first two chapters were difficult to read as he wrote it in an archaic transcript; however, it then switches to modern language which made it much more easy and interesting. Michael added addendums to his early novels that listed his sources. Oh, how I loved to research those. 

Enjoy the day, Ann