When the Summer of Quilts ended I was left with a handful of quilts that still needed topstitching and binding. Not wanting them to languish in a tub somewhere, but needing a break from quilt-making, I decided to finish one a month. I think I’m on track. I’ll just check…

In fact, I’m ahead! I finished the Blue Quilt in March, the Purple Quilt in April and I seem to have forgotten to blog about the Bookcase Quilt in May. I finished another one this month but won’t be posting about it until the recipient’s birthday has passed. What I can post about is the other quilt I finished in June: the Art Quilt.

I decided to use serpentine stitch on my machine again in the sections of plain colour, in a matching shade. Going around the squares was fun and somehow the start and end of the stitching always met, or came close. I like how every turn happens in a different part of the wave so you get a different ‘kink’ each time. The threads needed to be tied and hand-sewn into the batting because I wasn’t sure if I could back tack using serpentine stitch. Really, I should have just done a test – it would have saved a lot of work.

It would have been fine to leave the quilt as it was at this point, but the gaps between stitching seemed a bit wide to me. I decided to do more top-stitching, this time sewing around the multicoloured squares with multicoloured thread in straight stitch. Then I did a bit of thread ‘scribble’ in the white centres, which I love. I’d wanted to do that with fabric pens or crayons, but didn’t like the results when I tested them on scrap fabric, so I’d left them unadorned.

There’s just one quilt left to finish now. Only when it’s done am I free to make another quilt. Will I? Maybe. There’s enough flannelette left to make one, possibly two, small quilts. I’m also intrigued by the kawandi quilting technique.

But I am well stocked with quilts now, so maybe I’ll also impose a rule on not making more quilts until I’ve found homes for some of the ones I already have.