I was able to complete my quilt for the Madrona Road Challenge today. I can say it was a great satisfaction to see it done. I did a lot of sketching to end up with this design.  As I said in my previous post, I had the idea of a windmill. At first I started sketching half-square triangles, but it didn’t look the way I wanted. Then I saw the cover of this book by Barbara Cline, and I thought: “This is it, I got to piece triangles”. And from there I rapidly settled on a design. The final touch were the chevrons like in the Broken Herringbone print of the Madrona Road collection. I’m so glad I was able to bring my design to life.

The final touch was the quilting. I decided to go with wavy lines, like wind blowing in the windmill. I first delimited my sections using painters tape and started quilting those first lines using my walking foot. But as I started quilting the adjacent lines, I saw my fabric beginning to shift. So I decided to follow Amanda Jean’s suggestion and trade my walking foot for a darning foot. It seems I’m more comfortable free motion quilting. Still, I was a bit disappointed by the first few lines. Probably because I had my nose right into it and could see all my little mistakes. But as I progressed, I liked it more and more. And overall I can say I’m quite happy with the quilting. Even though it is not perfect, it really gives the effect I was looking for.

Here you can see the back. The blue fabric is the Sprout print from the Madrona Road collection. I’ve also used this print for the binding. This type of print is perfect for it!

The deadline for being considered by Michael Miller to be in their booth at QuiltCon is on January 31st. Violet Craft, the designer of this collection, will also be giving a prize to her favorite project. The deadline was really short for this challenge. Still  there is a lot of nice projects that have been added to the two Flickr pools (progress and finished). It seems I’m not the only one who likes to work under pressure. Take a look!