The Robot Quilt

Well, it's *almost* a quilt ... I just need to make a label then sew on the binding (which has already been made) and THEN it's a finish. :-)

I received the 4-patch blocks and some coordinating fabric as a UFO from one of my daughter's friends, who was decluttering.   I bought some other coordinating fabric for borders and finished the 4-patches into the quilt.

I quilted a 5-line cable in the top & bottom borders, using Nancy Johnson's "Cable Tool" template. 

The single rope design in the side borders was done using DeLoa Jones' "Rope-a-Dope" template.  Both of these tools are absolutely *fantastic* and I don't hesitate to heartily endorse them.

I quilted Baptist Fans in the interior of the quilt.  I don't have a fancy groovy board to stitch this out.  I use a series of concentric circles that I bought at our local plastics fabricator (TAP Plastics).  I just keep switching the circles I want to use to get the curve I need.  In this case, I used 3 circles: 4", 6" and 8".

The actual construction of the top was blessedly uneventful.  It was the QUILTING process that had some drama and excitement. :-)


The first drama was that I ... duh .. forget to check the tension before I started quilting.  The previous quilt had used a much thinner thread and the tension that worked for it absolutely, positively did NOT work for the thread I used for this quilt. 

Sadly, I didn't discover this until I had stitched rope border and one pass of the Baptist Fan design.  Happily, it was ONLY those two rows!  The silver lining is that, since the tension was so horridly, horridly WRONG, it was easy to just pull the bobbin thread out.

The rest of the quilting went quite nicely until the VERY LAST quilting .. the last border of the 5-line cable.   aaarrrgghhhh!

What was the DRAMA???   Well, you'll just need to read about it all (with more pictures) on its webpage, The Robot Quilt.  :-)

Now, I'm off to fire up the embroidery machine to make the label.  :-)