knucklehead finale

Knucklehead quilt is finished!!!!

And I’m in love with it.  I actually finished it about two weeks ago and every day I love it a little more.  It’s so done and complete and practical.  I think it’s more complete and finished than any of my beaded flowers ever were.  I was never completely happy with the finishing of those.  There was always something missing.  Not with this.  While sewing on the binding everything just came together wonderfully and completely.  I’m thrilled with it.

The fabrics came from my local quilt shop the Quilt Corner in Morton.  They have bundles of fat quarter batiks that I get in trouble with every time I go to this shop.  I fell in love with the bright crazy colors.  While sewing this together it dawned on me that the colors are very autumnish.  Sorta like looking up at a tree with bright yellow and red leaves and seeing the blue sky between the branches.  The back of the quilt is a wonderful orange flannel.  Super soft and cuddly.

The lettering was decided after a few weeks of piecing.  My FIL called R a knucklehead and it just fit.  We don’t really call R that regularly but the majority of the time he is one.  I was very inspired by the Patchery Menagerie for help in the piecing of the letters.  I actually think this was the most fun of the quilt.  I loved the puzzle of putting together the letters and then watching it all come together.  The biggest challenge was picking fabrics that wouldn’t make it difficult to read.

I hand pieced the entire quilt.  And loved it all.  It was relaxing and fun work to do.  I even developed some nice callouses.  I wasn’t too nitty gritty b/c that’s not my style.  So not all the pinwheels meet up perfectly.  But to me that’s part of the charm.  I quilted this with my mom on her machine.  I wanted it machine quilted to help strengthen any fragility that hand piecing might have caused.  I didn’t want it over quilted b/c I wanted the fabrics to be the focus and I wanted the blanket to drape and wrap around R.  We went with a simple diagonal quilt and the quilted around each letter. 

Despite this being my first ok I guess the Rock quilt was my first…Second finished quilt.  I’m going to enter this into the Celebrate Color Contest from Stitched in Color.  Rachel from SIC has been a huge inspiration the last few months while I’ve worked on this and started new projects.  She has amazing patterns and a keen eye for color and design in fabrics.  Not to mention the huge help her tutorials have been.  I was excited that Knucklehead could meet the qualifications for this contest. 

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