Cuzco

Cuzco is finished!

Cuzco was actually finished about a month ago but I didn't get a chance to take photos.

Since you last saw it, it has been quilted:

Ooops!

It has had the binding sewn down:

And it even had a label made for it using my lovely new machine:

Yep, I decided to call it Cuzco.  I'd been calling it Cuzco since the day it was cut out and no amount of trying to think of a fancy pants name paid off, so Cuzco it is!

This quilt took me a year and a half to make, though I pretty much only worked on it at Guild meetings, which used to be every six weeks, but then changed to monthly, so I don't think that's too bad!

The pattern is Stained Glass by Sarah at Narcoleptic in a Cupboard.  She ran it as a QAL in 2012 (you know me, always up there with the latest trends!) and the pattern is free and very easy to follow if you're interested in making one.  The fabric is a F8 bundle of Cuzco by Kate Spain that I nabbed on an Instagram destash.  I used Kona Steel for the sashing and binding.  I quilted it myself using the Angles and Circles pattern from Leah Day's 365 Quilt Designs book.

The back was pieced out of necessity.  I used a large piece of one of the Cuzco prints (I'd bought 3 yards following Amy Butler's instructions when I made her Weekender Bag, this was the lining, and it was far, far too much), a large piece of a Klona grey in a similar shade to Steel, a strip of pieced leftovers and a piece of blue/purple fabric I happened to have hanging around that I thought might go!

Then I stitched a label on my Janome, blanket stitched it in place by hand using pink embroidery floss, and took a picture of it upside down.

It says:

Cuzco (with a pink heart)
aka The Guild Quilt
my name
2014-2015

That there is my real name, not the spy name I usually use on t'internet, so if you're really curious, you can have an upside down squint and find out who I REALLY am!

I'd like to wish you all a Happy New Year's Eve.  Ours will be spent in front of the TV, cheese board on the coffee table.  Wine for Mr CA and coffee for me.  It was going to include Junior CA but I told her our plans and that I'd probably be in bed by 10 and she elected to go to a party at her friend's house instead.  She is 16 so I don't blame her.

Happy New Year everyone, I hope it is happy and healthy for you all.  I hope to see you around the Blogosphere in the new year and hope that you'll still come to visit me.  I don't have any resolutions or special plans, I'm going to try to concentrate on being happy.

Quilting Cuzco

Yep, you read that right, I have finally started quilting my Cuzco quilt.  I'm not sure how well you can see the quilting in these pictures below.

I used a grey thread the same shade as the sashing, you can make it out in the green patch at the bottom.

I'm doing the circles and angles from Leah Day's 365 Quilting Patterns book and I think it works well on this quilt, though I'm not sure if it's dense enough.

Much easier to see on the back.  I posted a mid-quilting shot on Instagram and had a comment from Kate Spain herself.  I refrained from going all fan-girly on her, though it was hard.

It's quilt guild again this weekend, but I won't be quilting this quilt.  Not because I don't want to, but because my machine decided on Saturday to do this:

That's the top, not the bottom.  No tension at all, no matter what I did.  It's back at the shop being repaired.  I feel a new sewing machine coming on...

cuzco update

It's been a long time since I updated you on the progress of my Cuzco stained glass quilt.  The last post was back in June when I said I'd finished all the blocks.  I had, but I decided to double the size of the quilt and so made all the blocks again.  I finished them during a guild meeting in the summer and they've sat waiting for me ever since.

It was high time I did something with them, I was sick of moving them from cutting table to ironing board to sofa and back again!  I had the house to myself last Saturday so I set myself up on the dining room table and spread the blocks out on the living room floor (it's open plan, I can't see through walls).

Time for sashing!

All sashed and rows sewn together.  Now I have to square it up (it's nowhere near square or even at all!), then add the wide borders.  I'm really nervous about this step as I really don't know how to go about squaring it up.  It's a twin sized quilt (I think!), though to me that means a single bed quilt.  I'm determined not to let this sit for another 4 months, so watch this space.