Sunshine by The Heathlands Project

Sunshine, 2015 by The Heathlands Project

The Heathlands Project's 2015 quilt is completed and down in Birmingham for this years Festival of Quilts! Despite my best efforts at being organised it was, as usual, a bit of a rush to get it finished in time but we did so all is well and the members are already looking forward to getting it back and hearing the judges comments.

Quilt details

Quilt details

Quilt details

I wrote before about this quilt and why, despite the stresses,  I like doing a big project like this with the group. Seeing everyone's work come together to create a coherent group piece is a really satisfying thing. One of the reasons it's always a bit of a rush to get finished is that I like to give the guys as long as possible to work on their individual patches. This of course means that there's less time for me to put it together but I love seeing all the different patches and how each individuals character shines through.

Laying out the patches

I wanted to create this year's quilt in a slightly different way to previous years. So, once I'd collected all the patches I laid them out on a base cloth, filling any gaps with sunshine coloured fabrics. I wanted to keep the edges if the fabric raw to add a bit more texture.

Quilt sandwich

Quilting on the sewing machine

One of the members of the textile group was really keen to help with the construction so along with one of the members of staff he made a 'quilt sandwich' of the layer with the patches, the wadding in the middle and a plain back cloth. They then worked together on the sewing machine to quilt these layers in place, fixing the patches as they went.

Adding the binding

Once all the quilting was done it was time to finish the edges. I wanted to have a go at binding the edges this year, previously we have worked on more of a bag like construction with the quilting being the final step. One of the comments we've had from some of the judges in the past is that we could do with a bit more quilting, which is why we took the approach mentioned above.

The binding and back of the quilt

By this point we were very short on time so I took the quilt home to finish off, doing the last bits of quilting, the binding and adding a hanging sleeve before parcelling it all up and sending it down to The Festival of Quilts. It was interesting doing the binding. I quite like the look and it's different to how we've normally done it. As usual I am not totally happy with the finished piece as it is not as nicely finished as I would like but I find generally when it comes back I can appreciate the good things about it more!