Doll Quilt - Pegged on the Line

This is the quilt that I made for Pattilou, my September partner in the Doll Quilters' Monthly swap. The theme was "Quilt in a Quilt", so I decided to do a quilt hanging on the line.

First I pieced a tiny little quilt top from pieces of dress weight cotton poplin that I had stashed in one of my scrap jars.  The individual squares in the tiny quilt ended up at seven eighths of an inch, and the border about an inch wide.

In the finished quilt, which measures about 16 by 16 and a half inches, the tiny quilt is hanging on the line in a free motion quilted garden.  The background colours are varied to give the impression of depth, with darker neutrals for the ground and a strip of pink in the sky.

The real fun in making this quilt was doing the free motion quilting.  The line needed to be strung from something, and posts would have been boring, so I decided to have it tied between two trees.

The first free motion quilting I did was a line of ferns for the foreground.  Next I did a line of grass.

Then it was time to do the trees.  Doing the tree on the right was easy enough.  To prevent having too much of the work bunched up under the arm of the machine, I decided to turn the quilt round and worked the tree on the left upside down.

Once the trees were finished I filled in the rows of grass in the background, diminishing the size and changing to a paler thread to give a feeling of perspective.

For the binding I used a pale brown cotton with a tiny pattern in a similar rusty red to the border of the quilt on the line. 

The finishing touch was hand stitching on the cord for the line, and quarter inch cylindrical wooden beads for the pegs.

For the piecing, straight line quilting and binding, I used my 1949 Singer 15K hand machine, and for the free motion quilting, the trusty 1945 Singer 15K treadle.

This quilt is now hanging in Pattilou's house in Utah, and I have to give her a huge vote of thanks for sending me all these pictures today so I could do this post... I can't use my own pictures because our computer is totally out of action.  I love and hate computers, whereas I love and love my sewing machines.  And Pattilou tells me she loves this quilt, and I love hers, so we are both happy!

Linking up again with Leah Day's blog for Free Motion Friday
and Sarah's blog Confessions of a Fabric Addict for Whoop Whoop Friday
and also this quilt is being entered into the Bloggers's Quilt Festival at Amy's Creative Side.... so loads of links for you to follow this week!