ONE FISH 🐠 TWO FISH 🐟

ONE FISH 🐠 TWO FISH 🐟 RED FISH 🐡 BLUE FISH 🎣

I made this quilt for our Florida family ... Dave, Sabrina, Ethan, Tyler, Dylan and Katie ❤️ They love to fish and so I made them a fish quilt.

This quilt was fun to make!  It's made out of eight "impossible" seams.  That's where you cut the same curve out of two fabrics laying on top on one another and then when you put them together to sew together the curves are going in opposite directions.  Hence, the impossible part. You have to slowly force them together.  Then you add three block strips and four borders and your "lake" is done.  

Now you're ready to add some fish.  You cut out your pieces and appliqué them to the "lake" on your sewing machine.  My machine is 46 years old and it doesn't do a great zigzag but I managed.  

All ready to appliqué onto the background of the quilt.

Then it was time to put it on my longarm, always my favorite part of the quilting process.  I loaded it on the longarm upside down so that I could make sure and center my "signature" in the bottom corner.  I signed this quilt with some fish bones.  I do have quilting labels with my name on but I always feel a bit pretentious stitching one of those onto a quilt.  I don't know, it's just me, most people do it.  Instead, I've started this thing where I sign the quilt with something other than my name.  I signed my brother's aLiEn quilt with an aLiEn and a puppy quilt with a paw print.  So, this time I paper pieced fish bones with the scraps from the quilt.  Kind of like a before and after shot of the fish.

I used Aurifil monofilament to stitch this with.  That's basically fishing line, if you think about it.  And MicroQuilter in a soft blue for the bobbin.  The backing is actually green but the blue blended right in. I turned my tension down to 1.25 because the thread is so thin and I did all the quilting in a day. I used Quilter's Dream Orient batting which is soft because I knew the appliqué would be stiff and I didn't want to make the quilt even stiffer with a cotton or poly batting.  Quilter's Dream Orient is bamboo and silk and very soft.  I quilted this doing stitch in the ditch around all the appliqué and the "impossible" curved seams.  And then I line quilted part of the lake and filled the rest of it in with random bubbles.

While binding the quilt by hand I watched Star Trek - A Search For Spock on Amazon Prime.

The binding all wrapped up on the Binding Baby and ready to be stitched on.

Then it was time for my Master Quilt Holder to go to work.  This time I made him walk down our hill to the boat ramp and take a picture next to the No Fishing sign.  (I can't believe they put that up there.) 

We had wanted to drive down to Florida this year and deliver the quilt in person but, you know ... COVID.  So.  In the mail it went.

I hope they enjoy it.  I'll always remember Dave fishing at night in our mutual backyard, using a glowing bobber and getting a bite from a gator.  Way to go, Dave!  We sure do miss them!  

Remember to pick up a needle and thread and sew some love into your world❣️