Finish A Long, the Last for This Quarter

This is my last Finish A Long post for this quarter, the last of my finishes. Finish no 5!!! Finish no 5 is my Circles quilt, my Bubbles Bee quilt. I blogged about it here in the proposed list in April, here in the summary of the proposed list last week.

My circles quilt was the Bubbles quilt designed by Alyin-Nilya and was a bee I took part in way back in 2016. My quilt has been a push me, pull me for quite some time.
Finished
Not Finished
Finished
Not Finished

The problem was that I got rather bored with this quilt. The blocks are very labour intensive. Foundation paper  pieced and each block is actually 4 blocks.

At the beginning they were incredibly difficult and loads of people dropped out, or just disappeared. Eventually we struggled towards a finish, our stash, our my stash, greatly depleted. At times I found myself having to buy fabric. I work on the principle that I wouldn't send anyone a block I wouldn't want to receive myself.

I decided to make mine double bed sized. Oh why, oh why! This meant I had to add a whole extra column and an extra row. That was a lot of black and white fabrics, and a lot of sewing.

 And then when I really did lose the will to live, I added a deep border in black and white stripes.

Next I moved onto the quilting. I know exactly how I wanted to quilt this. Lots of directional lines emanating from the circles. Didn't quite work out that way. I wanted white quilting on the white fabric and black in the black fabric. The reason I think it looks disjointed is because there simply isn't a dense enough quilting. This is where the finished/not finished debate kicked in. The quilt has been deferred in the Finish A Long a few times.

I added some hand stitching in perle cotton. I enjoyed doing this. I am happy with this. I added to this over the last quarter. It is restful to sit and hand stitch I find. And of course I love my spotty binding.

So . with the addition of that perle quilting ............. I have decided this quilt is finished.

Here it is over my garden lounger. It started me thinking about circles in the garden. I have houseleeks in pots, circular houseleeks in circular pots. Our feature on the BBQ, we haven't bothered using it this year. May as well make a decorative feature. You probably can't see, but there are circular logs and sticks for the fire stored underneath.

To be frank, I doubt I will ever get around to more quilting and it is already on the bed. It currently lives on the single bed in my daughter's old bedroom. What's that? A single bed? I know! I could have saved so much effort. I did put it on our own bed, but my husband didn't like it. Maybe he thought it needed more quilting! Actually he just likes the modern maples quilt I made. He helped me pick the fabrics, oh goodness, 20 years ago now. He waited about 15 years for this quilt, he seems determined to get his use out of it!

Of course this quilt deserves its own photo shoot. There are actually photo opportunities in and around Belfast, but I haven't had the opportunity to do it. So, I have unashamedly "borrowed" two photos online, I apologize, please don't sue me.
 

The first is Nuala with the Hoola. The common parlance for the Beacon of Hope sculpture, just at a busy junction for taking photos.

At an even busier junction, one of the main traffic intersections in Belfast, not easy for photos, are the Balls on the Falls, or as they are known locally, also known as the Westicles due to their proximity to said Westlink roadway. Apparently the Balls are officially known as Rise and controversially cost £400,000. I am a lover of public art, so I am happy enough but there was a lot of complaining at the time.

Helen x
linking up with Finish A Long, qtr 2