Seven Year Itch

Yikes!  Seven years in the making, Could this be true?  It is indeed.  Seven years ago I started working on this quilt and I am thrilled that it is now finally finished.  I have a million and one excuses as to why I these adorable veggies sat unattached in my sewing room closet for so long but let's not revisit that, let's just be happy that it is done.  As noted in my earlier post on this subject, most of these patterns were designed by Ruth McDowell and can be found in her pieced vegetables book.  While the Pieced Vegetables book is out of print, other books by Ruth are available from her website www.ruthbmcdowell.com.

When I first started making the individual paper pieced vegetables, I didn't have a long arm machine.  At that time, I used my domestic machine to do all of my quilting.  I had (and still have) an aversion to handling the bulk of a full sized quilt top, batting and backing on a on a domestic machine so I decided to quilt each of the vegetables individually.  This enabled me to do lots of detailed quilting and thread color changes before I added the sashing.  Once the sashing was added and all of the pieces were finally connected, I did some large scale, overall quilting to bring the entire sandwich together.

I really enjoyed the variety of fabrics that I was able to use in this quilt.  This was certainly a great stash busting exercise.  If you'd like to see some closer images of the vegetables, you can find them in one of my previous posts located here.


I had fun with the back too, I made a giant yellow pepper and bordered it with the same fabric that I used for the sashing.


Even though it was huge, I still paper pieced this pepper.  I used some large sheets of tracing paper to draft an enlarged pattern and sewed the large pieces together lust like I did the small ones.


Never give up on your unfinished work!