quilting

Minnesota State Seal Quilt Finish

I have the Minnesota State Seal Quilt Finish to show you today, a pretty fun way to start the week. Connie worked her magic as usual, adding quilting details that BigJ requested, along with her own creative stitching. BigJ’s comments on seeing her work – “Fantastic!” – and I think you will agree.

The quilt measures 47 inches square. I hand drew the loon and the wild rice patterns. For the construction of this quilt, I used improv (the water) traditional piecing (the trees and border), paper piecing (the star) and needle-turn applique (the loon and wild rice). The new Minnesota State Seal was the inspiration for this quilt. You can read more about that in this post. Let me show you the highlights of the quilting.

Swirls in the water, and a little detail on the tree trunks. On the new State Seal, the trees do not have trunks. I added the trunks at the request of BigJ.

I love the quilting of the trees, don’t you? It’s so much fun to discover clever details like that in a quilt!

The loon body (sorry about the lint – I thought I had it all brushed off!) and a quick peek at the details on the wild rice.

BigJ wanted two constellations added to the quilt (these are not part of the actual Minnesota State Seal). The North Star is shown in the upper right of the sky, along with some windy swirls and the detailing in the large star.

The second request was the “Hole in the Sky” constellation, which Connie added in the left area of the sky.

And here is the quilting in the borders.

You can see that the binding was done in the same deeper blue fabric. The backing is a wavy blue and white fabric that I thought fit the water theme in the quilt. You may recognize that fabric, because I used some of the remaining pieces for the backing of my Sunshine and Water quilt.

To hang the quilt, I basted corner tabs and two loop tabs to the quilt before I added the binding. Once the binding was stitched down, I tacked the bottoms of the loop tabs down as well. I bought a lath at our local home improvement store, which set me back a whole 59 cents. It was 48 inches long and 1-1/2 inches wide, and approximately 1/4″ thick. After sanding it down and cutting the length to size, it slid right into the tabs easily and will hang flat to the wall.

The Minnesota State Seal Quilt Finish was definitely one of my most challenging quilts I’ve made this year. I am very satisfied with this finish!

Happy Monday, all!

Wendy

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