The Summer Sampler is a yearly quilt-a-long hosted by Lee Heinrich of Freshly Pieced. I wrote about starting mine last summer in this post and have had the finished quilt top on my to-finish list for a few months now. After I knocked out all the Hawaiian quilts I felt like it was time to finish this guy.
I had a ton of fun quilting it, and here it is all finished:
I experimented with double batting for the first time on my Hawaiian Wall Hanging quilt, in large part to practice for the Summer Sampler. I’ve read that people use double battings to really get the quilting to pop and I wanted to give that a try. For the Summer Sampler I used Warm and Natural and Quilters Dream Poly. Man, it was thick and the final quilt is HEAVY! I had to break down and buy the HandiQuilter Sure Foot for my machine to use my rulers – the quilt sandwich was so thick my regular foot wasn’t working. I do really like my new foot, and I think the double batting looks great.
Here are some close ups of each part of the quilt. I didn’t want to change thread a million times so I used a light yellow thread for the whole thing. I had a great time coming up with quilting designs for each block.
I think this is my favorite grouping:
but this one is cool too 🙂
I did double lined piano keys in the border, which I really like a lot. It is simple but I think helps draw the eye to the inside of the quilt. I had never done piano keys in a border before, and I know I will be doing it again!
I finished it in February and took photos on a day after we had snow in Albuquerque. I thought it was funny to be photographing my Summer Sampler with snow (you can still see a little on the left side of this photo):
I had a ton of fun quilting it and am really happy with how he came out!
Final Details:
- Finished 77″ square
- Double batting with 1 layer of Warm and Natural cotton and 1 layer of Quilters Dream Poly
- So Fine#50 light yellow (#517) on the top, Bottom Line #623 in the bobbin.
- 325,867 total quilting stitches and 30 hours of quilting
Link Ups:
- This was a finish on my Q1’19 FAL list so I will be posting it on the FAL linky at the end of the quarter.
- Wednesday Wait Loss at Inquiring Quilter
Wow! I love your muted color palette and that quilting is stunning! There is so much of it! (Said by the person for whom the actual quilting is not a favorite step in the process.) This is beautiful!
So are you happy with the look of the double batting? I tried it once on a wall hanging and couldn’t see a difference, but my quilting wasn’t very dense, so that could be why.
Thanks Emily. I can’t take credit for the color palette because I bought a kit 😐 But I had loved the sample and always wanted to do a rainbow-like quilt, so I broke down and did it.
There is a lot of quilting! I often look at what I do now and think that there was NO WAY I would have done that on a domestic machine. I didn’t like the quilting that much either on a domestic. I felt bad about buying a long arm, thinking if I’m spending this much I really should love the quilting process more, but I think having the long arm has made me love it more. I’m also usually working on something for which there is no deadline, so that helps too.
I think I like the double batting, but I’m not sure if I’ll do it again – especially on something this big. I can tell the difference, though I think I see it more in the parts that aren’t as densely quilted. I really could tell the difference on the Hawaiian wall hanging I finished in January. But managing all those layers was hard and I wound up fighting tucks and puckers on the front and back more than I ever have. And it is so HEAVY now!! But it was a good experiment.
This is stunning!!!!