2013 Crossroads Quilters Guild Raffle Quilt

Another year, another quilt show, another raffle quilt!

Once again i quilted the Crossroads Quilters Guild  of Effingham IL. Raffle quilt that will be raffled off on the last day of the 2013 September quilt show.

This year the Raffle Committee  picked a free pattern titled Summer In The Park, if you Google it you will find tons (and i mean TONS!) of free tutorials on how to make the quilt! The raffle committee picked a range of autumn color batik fabrics to go with our fall quilt show.  The guild decided to title their quilt Autumn In The Park, to go with the quilts colors!

When Sue W. (raffle quilt committee chairman) handed over the quilt the first thing i thought of was Modern quilting. But i wasn't all that sure that modern machine quilting designs would work all that well with the fabrics nor was i confident that modern quilting would go over well in our area. You see the Modern Quilting movement still has not made it to this part of Southern Illinois! Go figure!  In the end i had to ask some friends and fellow machine quilters for some help with ideals for quilting. I ended up blending a couple of different suggestions together and then changing them up just a  it to make it work for me.

Here is a photo of the quilt once i had the quilting finished up:

I had some issues getting the quilting to show up in the photos!

This one shows the quilting pretty good. I went with two colors of thread, Natural for the lighter areas with some double ribbon swirl quilting. Then for the darker areas i used a solid brown Espresso color thread with a slightly modern U-Turn quilting design. I used Essential Pro thread from Connectingthreads.com and the Raffle Committee picked Quilters Dream Polly batting. If you look you can see that the seams of the blocks didn't always match up perfectly so i tried to do quilting that would not draw to much attention to the seams. All the blocks are cut on the bias so the edges would stretch easily when sewing them together

The quilting took some time, lots and lots of stops and starts that had to be finished off. The thread color changes went very smoothly, i was able to quilt all the Natural thread areas then go back a second time and quilt the Espresso color thread areas. Raffle tickets went on sale this past weekend at the Effingham Artisan Fair and will continue to be available until just before the winning ticket is picked!