Hi habibis! Amy’s Creative Side is hosting the Blogger’s Quilt Festival for this fall and I’m entering for the first time! I’m entering my Drunkard’s Path comforter in the ROYGBIV category (and the wedding quilt I made for my friend N in the hand quilted category). See all the posts here and make sure to vote!
I love this quilt soooo much. I possess a total of four of my quilts currently – two I made for my grandparents and a windowpane quilt I made for myself – but my Drunkard’s Path is special because it’s the very first quilt I made for myself. I wanted to replace the comforter I’d had since freshman year of college, which was old and not in great shape, and I finally got around to starting a quilt to replace it in late fall of 2013. I have a deep and abiding love for polka dots (all prints in general, but especially polka dots) and I decided to make myself an all-polka dot quilt. Furthermore, I wanted to practice my curved piecing, so I picked Drunkard’s Path as my pattern.
I had a ton of polka dot prints in my stash already, but I bought two prints specifically for my quilt: a white with lavender dots to be the background fabric for the Drunkard’s Path blocks and a yellow with white dots for the border and backing.
I cut 6″ squares from the white print and from my collection of polka dot prints. Then I cut them on the curve and matched them up.
I’d done a little bit of sewing on a curve, but not much. I basically just pinned as carefully as I could! This part took a looooong time.
When I had sewn all of the patches, which I did on and off for weeks (maybe even a couple of months) while I worked on other things, I settled down to arrange the layout. I went in color order, more or less, starting with the black and white polka dot prints at the bottom left and moving toward pink at the top right. The order is kind of like this: black – white – purple – blue – green – yell0w – orange – red – pink.
I sewed my rows together and added the yellow border. This is my parents’ couch modeling the quilt for me. 🙂
I did two types of quilting on the main part of the quilt, by machine and by hand. By machine I did a meandering line in yellow all over the quilt. (I won’t call it stippling because it’s not close quilting at all.)
For the hand quilting, I traced circles using plates and quilted them with a running stitch, using threads that matched the colors of that section.
I quilted the border by machine, as well. I quilted half circles in different colors all the way around the border. I used pink and blue thread on the semi-circles over the border and green thread on semi-circles reflecting the blue ones. Doesn’t it look cool?
Here’s the finished quilt, in its place of honor on my bed. You may notice that I use it as the picture at the top of my blog, as well, because I love it so much and I think it’s very me.