If you've been lurking around here for awhile, you've seen this quilt before.
I tutorialized it here. I just never got around to posting the finished photos. The reason for this is that I never felt like the photos did the fabrics in this collection justice. About the time I started working on this quilt, we invested in a new camera that is nice, but it absolutely baffles me. I'll be honest. It's way too much technology for me, and I'm an E-RESOURCES librarian. Let that sink in for a minute. I'll let you decide whether that means I'm a terrible flake at my job or if it means that I'm just too lazy to read the owner's manual for the camera.
Maybe a little bit of both. Hmm.
The first round of photos of this finished quilt were way too overexposed, and when I tried to correct the issues in
Picnik, the quilt just looked strange. (That might or might not have a teeny tiny bit to do with my complete and reckless ignorance of correcting photos post-production.) Here's one of the photos I included in the tutorial, since I was ready to post the dang thing already, instead of waiting another day for sunlight to take more photos. Exhibit A:
So I decided to take a couple of quick shots of the quilt in its natural Christmas surroundings - in a doll cradle in front of the fireplace with all of my other Christmas quilts. These photos were a tad bit blurry and dark, due to lack of light at 9pm on a cold winter night. Exhibit B:
THEN I took this quilt out one last time for a photo shoot a couple of weekends ago, this time to the other side of the house, where there's a bit more shade. After a quick tutorial from the Husbatron (who actually reads owners' manuals) on how to prevent extreme overexposure when the sun's out, followed by some heavy-handed post-production work in
Picnik, I'm a little bit more pleased with these results. Exhibit C:
I'm still not convinced that these pictures truly capture the great colors in this collection, but most of you who haunt the fabric stores and frequent blogs by people who know how to use their cameras have probably seen these prints by now, right? So you don't need to be convinced that these fabrics are, in fact, awesome and vibrant.
As for the nitty-gritty information about this quilt, the backing is not from the collection - it came off the sale rack at
Thimble Pleasures, one of the sweet local fabric shops. ($4/yard? Yes, please!)
For the quilting, I stippled in the charcoal gray sections, with matching charcoal gray thread. In the inner border, I did a scalloped loop pattern - this might be my new go-to pattern for skinny borders/sashings. It was sooo much easier than it looks, promise!
This is the video that gave me the courage to try it: For the outer border, I quilted a paisley scalloped type pattern, kind of
like this but puffier.
If you'd like to make your own version of the quilt, look for the tutorial
HERE. You might find yourself addicted to this pattern. I know I was there for awhile. (See
here and
here for pictoral evidence.)
Vital stats:
Started: December 2010
Finished: December 2010
Machine-pieced, machine-quilted
Fabric collection: 12 Days of Christmas by
Kate Spain for
Moda
Now, on to why I'm a terrible librarian. If you know anything about librarianship, you might or might not know that we're a profession that prides ourselves on bringing order to chaos, followed by a deep pride in our sensible shoes. Some of us get a real charge out of classifying and organizing items/resources/socks to make them more easily accessible to others. Some of us, (cough cough) on the other hand, have terribly disorganized flickr accounts and only use the classification systems available to us on a haphazard basis (i.e. tags, titles, descriptions, notes in flickr). It took me waaaay too long to dig these photos out of my flickr photostream, since they were taken 2 months apart. Another life project to add to the queue: clean up my flickr account! Any tips or suggestions?
