Finished Fall Tumbler, 999 projects to go!

The Fall tumbler quilt, finished and in use. It was a learning experience from start to finish, and I've been quilt making since 1984. Before that if you count piecing squares on my grandmother's treadle machine at age 6.

The size is about 32" long and about 11" wide
68 tumblers all pieced from scrap bins

hand quilted with 40 weight thread doubled, and thick gold metallic thread doubled. No quilters were injured in the making of this quilt.

I finally traced around my cutout paper with my chalk powder wheel. It left a mark long enough to get a feel for where I was going, then I would just keep quilting til it looked okay. No need to wipe off any marks!!

After quilting I backed it with black felt, stitched 1/8" from the tumbler edge and trimmed close to finished tumblers leaving about 1/8" black felt.

It needed some more trim so I couched down the embroidery thread, 12 wt hand dye from ArtFabric, to make a finished edge line. It's slightly crooked because I just eye-balled it using my walking foot as the couching foot caused it to stretch.

See the top and bottom edges left tumbling. Note the couched thread wonky quilting and embroidery.

Lessons
1. Glue basting to paper isn't nice to work on and when you pull the paper out eventually the ones on the edge open up. grrr. this doesn't happen with thread basting which takes about the same amount of time.
2. The chalk powder wheel leaves a mark even on prints.
3. Oh yeah, I like hand quilting and hand embroidery
4. Doesn't have to be perfect to be lovely
5. I seldom rip out, I change direction and keep going
6. It's not done til the last thread is couched and the last bead is on, not on this one though.
7. Tumbler shapes are fun to sew and I have plans for two more.
8. It's really easy to hand quilt a straight line but it's cuckoo to hand quilt a spiral without marking through random seams and expect it to be even.
9. I like the uneven quilting because it shows the hand of the maker. Perfection is so yesterday.