My Lighthouse Quilt

Last Friday I shared how Mom, Aunt Brenda, and I spent a day quilting, and I pieced this top together.  This past week I quilted it, and I'm now finishing up the binding.  Wow - I'm finishing a quilt in one week!  That just might be a record for me.

I purchased this fabric (everything but the backing) in the Outer Banks of North Carolina on our vacation in 2013.  Like any normal quilter would do, I sought out the local quilt shops while we were there, and the fabric was my souvenir.

While we were there in 2013, we visited the Bodie Island Lighthouse and also the Currituck Lighthouse.  Bodie was packed with people when we went, so we didn't go up to the top, but we did go to the top of the Currituck Lighthouse, and it was an amazing view.

Bodie Island Lighthouse

View from Currituck Lighthouse

View from Currituck Lighthouse

Currituck Lighthouse

So, back to quilting...

I have been wanting to spend some more time practicing my free motion hand-guided skills on the longarm, and several months ago I had purchased a class from Craftsy, Machine Quilting Negative Space with Angela Walters.  So I finally watched the videos and used what I learned in the class to quilt my lighthouse quilt.  I used the swirls and circles designs together, and in the lighthouse blocks I did a different design that I copied from a book I have.  The class was very good.  I would recommend it, especially to beginners.  It was a lot of fun to work on.

At first I was happy that the fabric prints are mostly so busy that you can't notice the quilting.  Even the backing fabric is a print which doesn't show the quilting.  After I was finished I wished the quilting would stand out more because I am really happy with it.  I tried to take some pictures to show the quilting, and the texture is really nice over the whole thing.

Now this winter my family can cover up with this awesome quilt and dream about the great times we had at the Outer Banks and hopefully another beach vacation sometime in our future.  This souvenir is better than a t-shirt any day.

Something else very cool to share with you is I found my Astronomical Star quilt block in one of the quilts at the Houston International Quilt Festival!!  Remember this one?  Quilters from all over the world sent in blocks for the quilts, and 28 quilts were made from the blocks collected.  Click here to see an article about it.

In the picture above, my block is in the second row from the top, 4th block in from the left side.  I was so excited to find it in some Facebook pictures this week.

Thanks for stopping by and reading about my week in quilting!  I have some customer quilts I will be working on next.  I'll be liking up at Finish It Up Friday over at Crazy Mom Quilts.

---