Curio Hourglass Quilt: A Finish

The Beginning

I went out to Holly Hill Quilt Shoppe with mom for the first time quite a while ago and they had a collection from BasicGrey that I had not seen before, Curio. I loved the yellows in it and definitely wanted to add this collection to my stash.

There wasn't a lot left yardage wise, so I decided to pick up a layer cake. When I was browsing around on Pinterest, I cam across this quilt complete with video tutorial. Perfect! Over at Fabric Depot, I picked up some white from the Moda Grunge line for my neutral because I liked the way it complimented the collection.

The process didn't go as fast as I thought it would but all in all wasn't too bad.  Before long I had a completed quilt top.

The backing went together easily and I am quite pleased with the print I ended up with the main part. It has a tiny script on it but reads mostly solid without being boring. I also used up the rest of the layer cake squares to add some interest. And let's face it, what do you do with random left over pre-cuts? I mean, throw them in the scrap box for sure, but I always struggle with how to use them. Though, I am getting better at this thanks to all the scrappy inspiration out there in blogland.

Crappy photo trying to get a feel for how the back would look.

Let the Madness Begin

I knew that I wanted to keep the quilting simple and planned to just outline each of the hourglass shapes on either side. I picked out a medium colored brown Aurafil thread and set to work. This is where things got crazy and this quilt started it's journey to the long wait in the UFO pile.

As I was quilting, I felt like my stitches were bunching up strangely, but there weren't any wrinkles or puckers in the fabric, so I forged on. The quilting was going quite quickly so it was when I was OVER half done that I got the bright idea to give the stitches a little tug. I instantly heard, SNAP! POP! and thought, NoNoNoNoNo!  Yep, the thread broke, in many places. I kept tugging. It kept popping. It was painful, but I knew the quilt wasn't viable as it was. I still have no idea what caused it. The thread, the machine tension, the batting (which was a new kind for me)?

To the UFO pile it goes. I needed to pull out nearly ALL the stitches and start over. I had no idea when I would get around that unpleasant task.

One day when I was thinking I wanted to do nothing but watch TV and feeling guilty about it, I decided the pull the quilt out and rip stitches while keeping an eye on what Castle and Beckett where up to. It wasn't quite as painful as I had imagined, though it did take a good long while.

Back at It

After another good long wait in the UFO pile, I was ready to give the quilting another shot. I hadn't done any re-pinning or anything after the pulling the stitches out. I loaded the same thread into the same machine and set about my business. It all went beautifully. Before I knew it, I was done and the quilt was ready for binding!

Without procrastination, I went and cut out my binding, sewed it together, pressed it and got it sewn onto the quilt. I am on a roll!

To continue my progress, I made the gutsy decision to take the quilt with me to the agility trial that weekend. There is a fair amount of down time, but it isn't the cleanest place to take a not-yet-finished quilt. I managed to get half the binding hand sewn over the weekend without incident.

I was on a roll! It didn't take very to finish the sewing the binding and just like that, I had a finished quilt that I was darn pleased with! So far, I managed to keep it from mother's clutches and have it listed in my Etsy shop. SOLD!