11 - 11- 11 finally finished!

The all corduroy quilt which I made for  Corduroy Appreciation Day (11-11-11) is finally finished! You can read about its beginnings here.

 I backed it with a piece of flannel (which I bought YEARS ago with the idea of making a nightie for myself).  I did not use any batting, because I felt the corduroy was heavy enough; it didn't need the extra insulation.

 I took my time quilting it using either red or light blue perle cotton #8. Sometimes I used the big stitch, but more often I reverted to a smaller stitch length, simply because that is what I am used to. I had no overall quilting plan, so each section was decided as I came to it.  There are two pieces of velvet in the quilt, which I left unquilted.  The binding is made from a tight velour or suede cloth, which was in the bag along with the corduroy pieces that I had received.

 Friends asked me if corduroy is hard to hand quilt. Actually no.  It isn't as tightly woven as one might expect. Not having a batting to needle through also helped.

This is the most free formed quilt I have ever made.  The more I look at it, the more I like it!

Corduroy!

I had no intention of making a corduroy quilt when I first read about Corduroy Appreciation Day in LeeAnn's blog.  I didn't even have corduroy in my stash.  However, just before Halloween, a bag of orphan fabric scraps was left at my home.  I looked through the stuff and pulled out some corduroy.  Bright blue, bright red, dark green, and a little bit of green velvet. Yummy stuff.  How could I ignore the challenge, especially since the red was already cut in large, elongated triangles?

I decided to let the red triangles take the lead in terms of size of my pieces and put together whatever I could with what I had. Free form piecing.  The result was stimulating.  So much so that I took my husband's cords right out of the dryer and cut them up.  (Yes, I did get his permission.  They were too big for him anyway.) This introduced the gray green.  Almost done, but not quite...


It still needed something more, so I asked my neighbor, who sorts clothing at the Kiwanis Thrift Store, to bring home some trousers.  She brought me at least six pairs, but I chose to cut up only two, the dark blue and the dull red.  Finally with borders made from these pants, I had a quilt that felt right. It measures roughly 65" x 50".  I am not going to square it up, so some spots may be longer or shorter than that.  (The picture doesn't do justice to the wales... they go in all directions making a cool design element.)

Now I gotta figure out the backing and quilting.  Hmmmm.

It is hard to see that all the pieces are corduroy - the bright red, bright blue and dark green are fine wale, the gray-green is regular (medium?) wale and the dull red and dark blue are wide wale.  The bits of dull green beneath the bright blue is velvet, which, to me, is a really dense corduroy.

Thank you, LeeAnn, for introducing me to corduroy for quilting.  This stuff is addicting.  I just might take the scissors to the other trousers from Kiwanis and do a patchwork puzzle with them !