Gravity Quilt

I’m sure you are starting to see this quilt around the internet a lot and if not you will soon.   The pattern is called Gravity and it is by Jaybird Designs.   This quilt belongs to the Manitoba Prairie Quilters, which is a guild located in Winnipeg, and this will be their Raffle Quilt for their Quilt Reflections Show on April 8 - 10, 2016.   It was pieced by Joan Dupuis-Neal and she completed the quilt top in four days!    And since it took me four days to quilt I guess you could call this quilt an eight day project! LOL…or maybe not!   We were both doing our best to get this top completed on a deadline so the MPQ buy their raffle license and print their tickets.   I am not a member of this guild, too far away, but if you are interested in tickets you can leave your email in the comments and I’ll forward your comment to my contact person in their guild.  Tickets should be available sometime in June.

So I’m going to warn you now, this post if picture heavy!   

Gravity is a large quilt, 96” x97”, and I was asked to keep the quilting light to keep within the guilds budget and that was no problem as I love light custom, that’s my thing as you know.   So it took a bit of time to come up with the quilting designs and made a lot of those decision went I had the quilt on the machine.  First thing I did was search online for inspiration and only found two completed Gravity quilts.  One is the cover quilt on the pattern which you can see on Jaybirds blog here and the second was on Teresa’s blog Quilting is my Bliss which you can see here.   I used elements from these quilt in the center designs and 95% of the quilting is done with rulers.   For the background I know right away I wanted that to be a different style of quilting from what is in the center to really separate the two areas and allow the center to shine.  This is the first sketch I came up with and it ended up being the final design.  I wanted to have rays coming from the center but also echo the design and I think this was the perfect combination, giving it an overlapping feel.

All the seams on this quilt are pressed open, which is a style of quilting I am not use too so I needed to avoid stitch in the ditch as much as possible.   So out came the rulers, mainly my Quilted Pineapple Templates, love those curved rulers.  This was the first time I tried the smallest one, the BFF, as I usually free hand small CC’s curve.  But I loved how perfect it made the quilted curves look on this quilt as it is made entirely of solid fabrics.

The guild requested that I used Mono Poly thread which I rarely use but in this case it was the perfect chose. It was the reason I could quilt this quilt so fast and I was pleasantly surprised how much I liked the final look, it gave it a bit of a shine too.  I used a grey Bottom Line in the bobbin as the backing was grey.   The batting is Quilters Dream Blend.

One design element that you might not notice right away is that the six center diamonds are all quilted the same even though they are not pieced exactly the same.  That gave the center a pleasant focus even though I wasn’t following the seam line on all of the diamonds.

Here are some close up pictures of the quilting designs.

And yes I was out on the ice this morning, just had too!  It has been cool this week with below freezing temperatures at night so the lake ice is still thick enough to walk on off the end of the dock.

So there it is and I know it won’t be the only one I quilt as a few of my quilting friends are making this quilt right now.

I hope this turns out to be a great fundraiser for the Manitoba Prairie Quilters and I hope to make it down for the show next year.