Sewvivor - snips snippets

Welcome, welcome new friends and old. I would like to take a quick minute to show you all my entry into this season of Sewvivor. Fair warning, picture overload is about to commence!
 Enough chit chat already!!

BLAM!!

There she is, in all her unfinished glory, my proudest quilty achievement! My Gypsy Wife!
That's right, still not finished. I really underestimated how long it would actually take to hand quilt this. I was positive it would take a month or two tops. Wow, so wrong. I've been at it almost four months now and i still have quite a ways to go yet.

I did however manage to get enough quilted to finally put the binding on. I was hoping to have it finished in time to use it as my entry for Sewvivor 3. (that was after i was hoping to have it finished for Bloggers Quilt Festival!) So on a whim, i thought i'd email Rach at Family Ever After (superstar host of Sewvivor) and see if it was okay to use semi finished projects. You have no idea how ecstatic i was when she emailed me back and said it was okay! I hustled and bound the half of the quilt that was fully quilted and thought i'd be fine with it. Nope. No way i was going to post my very first full shot of my Gypsy Wife with only half a binding on. So i pulled out my tools of the trade and desperately tried to get as much stitched as possible!

I did my best to get at least some of the bigger blocks partially quilted so there would be minimal movement once they're fully quilted.

Fingers crossed it doesn't all go to pot when i finish the quilting!!

I've really, truly enjoyed hand quilting this. Though i should have timed it better so the quilting portion was being done in the winter. Sitting under this sucker in middle of the summer is like wearing saran wrap in a sauna, blech!

I probably would have been done the quilting had i gone with a simple design or even just straight lines. But all the Anna Maria Horner prints were begging for special treatment!

But where some get the royal stitchery treatment,

Others are left to shine without the grand details.

For my very first foray into hand quilting, i think i'm doing pretty well.

My stitches could definitely be better, but slowly i'm getting there. And i think by my next hand quilted project (and believe me, there will be more!) they will be better yet!

I wish you all could feel the texture that the quilting is giving this, so awesome!

And the mix of super dense quilting with random embroidery work and sparse quilting is making for a pretty interesting back!

Which of course has been kept pretty simple as always ;)

And you can see on the left hand side of the above shot is where all of my blocks have been finished. The right, not so much. And i love how you can see where the strips at the bottom of the quilt are on the back. Quilting them was some of my favorite work.

That strip of AMH with the little squares, how could i not fill them with cross stitches! I'm envisioning a whole canvas of that print, cross stitched like crazy. Hmmm. Yep, adding that to my to do list ;)

So i guess you all want some details (probably not, you're all here for the eye candy right?!)

The pattern is the fantastically crazy Gypsy Wife by Jen Kingwell.
And if ever i was to design a pattern that best shows who i am, this would have been it!

Most of the fabrics were gloriously fussy cut Anna Maria Horner prints, from multiple lines.

Mostly Field Study and Dowry, but there are some bits of Hand Drawn Garden in there as well. (You have no idea how badly i wanted to start over when i had Pretty Potent in hand!) And for the most part, most of the low volume prints are Carolyn Friedlander, goddess of the low vol prints!

I used AMH Cracking Codes in Petal for the binding and i definitely want to add yardage of it into my stash!

All of it was pieced by me on my little old Ken, using whatever colour of Aurifil i had loaded in at the time.

Mostly Dove Grey though, that colour is the best neutral thread ever!

But winner of the best thread ever in the history of the world...

Aurifil #2975 - Brass. I love this colour so very much! Gypsy was quilted entirely in this shade in 12wt. Though i do also have it in 40wt as well and used that for hand sewing the binding down. I want to quilt all the things in brass!

So yeah, i guess that's it. I'm unsure of the overall size, though i'm guessing it's pretty close to what the pattern states it is, 59x68. I will do a final measurement after washing and drying. (which i'm terrified of doing, so any tips on washing and drying hand quilted dealies would be greatly appreciated!)

I have my fingers crossed that i make the cut for Sewvivor but i guess we'll have to wait and see! Though even if i don't make the cut, you can bet that i'll be there following along with those that do! Lots of awesome entries!

High fives for finally kinda, almost, finishing my Gypsy Wife!
And double high fives (or would that be high tens?) for bravely getting out of my hobbit hole and actually daring to do something so very out of the norm for me!!

And here's one more shot for the road ;)