Finish! The Mariner's Compass Quilt

The Mariner's Compass quilt, henceforth known as "Anacortes," is finally finished and all krinkly warm from the dryer! This is by far the heaviest quilting I have ever done and also the most custom quilting. It took several days, spread out over a couple of weeks, to finish. There was also quite a bit of trial-stitching and unpicking in this quilt, which is something new to me. I hate to admit it, but it's true: I'm usually too lazy to undo something once I've done it. My motto is: "I'll do it better the next time."

I quilted the compass medallion by stitching in the ditch around most of the elements and then quilting lines in the "shadowed" points of the compass, using my presser foot edge as a guide. I quilted curving lines in the outside triangle to try to give it more depth and I really like the way that came out.

The real star of this quilt is this beautiful fabric with a native fish motif that I picked up last summer when I was on my sailing trip in Anacortes, WA. I basically made this quilt to showcase that fabric, pulling all the rich colors from the fish to make my fabric choices. The pic above and the very top picture on this page have been color tweaked to show a more true representation of the colors in the quilt, the rest of the pictures really don't do the depth of the colors justice. They are unbelievably saturated. I quilted the fish fabric using black thread around the fish, filling in any large gaps which echo quilting, so that the fish would pop once it was washed.

The geese got a curved line across the bottom and stitch in the ditch around the point and I used a chalk pencil to mark big waves in the outer border.

That single piece of yellow in the binding on top was a happy accident. After I trimmed the backing down to size I used the scraps to turn into binding and that piece was from where the pieced yellow stripe runs across the backing. I decided to leave it in on impulse and I'm glad I did, I really like the look.

The quilting is easier to see from the back, especially since my bobbin thread was a bit too light. I like it, though. It almost makes the quilt reversible.

And of course, we had lots of help with taking the pictures from the local supervisors. That's Thor's orange tail going under the edge. He made sure to get plenty of cat hair on the bottom of the freshly laundered quilt to make it officially a Kat quilt!