Blogger's Quilt Festival - Vintage Rouge

 

Welcome to the Fall 2013 Blogger's Quilt Festival. I've entered my labor of love for this year, Vintage Rouge.

Vintage Rouge was a BOM project offered by one of my local quilt shops. It's a Bloom Creek pattern made with Marcus Brothers Fabrics. I fell in love with this quilt the minute I saw a photo of it in the shop's class listing.

I love hand applique, and I love Dresden Plates, so this project and I were a match made in Heaven.

 I like to make things my own, so in place of hand embroidery of the words 'love', 'joy', 'hope', and 'peace' in the 4 pieced star blocks, I made up a little applique flower, close to the style of the other appliques on the quilt. I liked this much better as it made the quilt appear a little less 'Christmasy', which would allow for year-round use.

Another way to 'make it my own' was to add a semi-scalloped border, only one diagonal top and bottom corner have scallops...the rest of the quilt edge is straight.

It was quite a challenge to quilt on my domestic sewing machine...the largest quilt I have quilted so far (84x84 inches), but I carefully marked out grid lines and I taught myself how to make tuille stencils for some of the quilting (corner blocks) and I echo-quilted around the applique. I was very pleased with the finished quilting and it gave me a lot of confidence in my ability to handle machine quilting on my home sewing machine. Not to mention, I learned quite a bit about what kind of markers to use on fabric (water soluble is not always water soluble :) ).

Vintage Rouge won 2nd place in our Viewer's Choice large quilt category at my Guild's Spring quilt show. It won First Place in the applique quilt category at the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair in Maryland this past August. This is the first time I've ever had a quilt I made judged, and I was pleased with the judge's comments (though they think my binding could use a little improvement :) ).

Of all of the quilts I've made, I'm most proud of the work I did on this one, and I'm looking forward to taking it out as soon as I put away the Halloween quilts this year.

If you'd like to read more about the process, or see my tutorial on how to make tuille stencils, just enter 'Vintage Rouge' in the search box at the top of this blog post. All posts related to this project will be displayed.

Thanks for visiting, and I hope you love Vintage Rouge as much as I do. Be sure to use the link in the sidebar at the left to jump back to the Blogger's Quilt Festival site to visit the rest of the beautiful quilts on display this Fall.

Enjoy!