Hi everyone,

If you’ve been following me during the past year, you know that I’ve been working on a BOM by Fig Tree called Sea Glass. This BOM uses a soothing palette of sea glass: greens, blues, and creams.

In January, we received our final BOM packet to not only complete the blocks for month 12, but we also received the final setting instructions for the quilt. So exciting!

When I sew blocks together to form a quilt top, I like to arrange them all first and then take a picture so that I can remember the order in case things get messed up. Sometimes I put the blocks away into a WIP pile, and sometimes my little inspector likes to do a little rearranging!

I then sew my blocks together into rows, one at a time. I press each row carefully and remove stray threads. I like to use Clover Patchwork Glass Head pins because they are heat resistant and glide through the fabric easily.

I also use a fine mist spray bottle with plain water and a hot iron for pressing. I do not use water in my iron to avoid potential issues like rust stains. Plus, I do foundation paper piecing often and steam is a big no-no because it shrinks the paper.

The Sea Glass quilt has, what I call, “feature” blocks and “spacer” blocks. The spacer blocks form a beautiful Irish chain with subtle variations between a light green color and a light aqua color. The feature blocks are all different, usually 2 per month during the BOM. They use deeper hues of blues, aquas, and greens, like beautiful sea glass found on the beach.

Here’s a look at the quilt with all the rows sewn together, but before I added any borders:

The final quilt layout contains 3 borders. The first border consists of cream-colored squares that were leftover pieces from the feature blocks. The second border uses the sawtooth flying geese units that we sewed at various stages during the BOM. The third and final border uses long pieces of the cream colored background. The quilt is roughly 72″ x 72″ before quilting.

It’s been so rainy here lately that it’s been very difficult to get a good picture of the completed quilt flimsy (top), but we finally got a bit of afternoon sunshine yesterday.

In this first picture, my husband is holding the quilt with his arms as wide as he could go!

In this second picture, I’m standing on a little ladder while my teen took the picture. The quilt is dancing in the breeze, and we can’t catch a moment of still air. Oh, the problems of taking quilt pics “in the wild!” I do like how the afternoon sun shines through the quilt, illuminating the sea glass colors.

I haven’t yet decided on quilting. I plan to use this quilt on the bed in my guest bedroom so I’m leaning towards free-hand edge-to-edge quilting rather than custom quilting.

I also plan to back it using minky fabric, possibly this Cuddle in Turquoise. It will so soft and comforting!

With a little luck, I’ll have time to quilt it this weekend.

Happy quilting!

~Jen