Blogger's Quilt Festival Fall 2014 - Octastring quilt

While the great and good of the quilting industry have been hustling at International Quilt Market I've been busy putting the finishing touches to this quilt with the sole intention of being able to share it in Amy's  Blogger's Quilt Festival. My Octastring quilt has been a long time in the making! Apologies to regular visitors for re-visiting familiar territory, I'll keep it brief ;) I designed the block in 2012, originally intending to use my Flea Market Fancy  and Hope Valley stash, but quickly ran out of steam for the project.

A year later I had a light-bulb moment, why not get the ladies of the HipBees to make the blocks for me?! By this time Denyse Schmidt had released yet more fabulous fabric ranges to plunder for this project. I threw in prints from Shelburne Falls and Florence to supplement the Hope Valley and Flea Market Fancy. I received 10 fabulous blocks and added 2 of my own to complete the lap-sized quilt top. I'm a sucker for a secondary pattern!

Then, as is usual for me the WIP got put to one side yet again. It sat like this on my design wall for way too long! The problem was mainly that I felt the top needed a border but I didn't want anything too big in case it detracted from the design.

Finally, last week, I added a 2 and a half inch solid border and cracked on with finishing the project! I pieced a simple backing for the quilt using some of the scrap remnants from the original block construction and some yardage of one of my favourite prints from the Flea Market Fancy reprint.

I did a very simple quilting treatment as there's so much going on in this quilt already with all those prints. I used a nice aqua blue Aurifil thread for some straight line machine quilting then echo quilted the octagons with chunky hand quilting and Perle 8 thread.

The finishing touch was the self-binding, slightly fiddly but well worth the faff.

I'm absolutely delighted with how the quilt has turned out and I'm so thankful to my fabulous bee mates for making it happen!
This quilt finished up at around  45" by 58", so perfect for keeping my lap warm in the evenings when watching tv. I can't resist leaving you with the finished quilt again :)

I'm linking this one up to the Original Design category of the Blogger's quilt festival. If you like it maybe you'd be able to see your way clear to voting for it or maybe even nominating it for a Viewer's choice award. Either way it's well worth visiting Amy's site to check out all the other awesome entries!

If you fancy making an Octastring project yourself, you'll find the Octastring block details on our website.
Thanks for visiting today, I hope you'll visit again. Catch you soon x