Beachcomber

 

When our local quilt shop was selling out, my daughter, grandson and I visited there together at least a couple of times. On one of those occasions, my daughter called me over to show me this quilt kit, and asked if I would make it for her. Though she had taken a couple of quilt classes as a child, she is really not a quilter. She sews, crochets and knits, but, aside from those few projects she completed as a child, she does not make quilts. But she wanted this quilt and knew who could - and would - make it for her. I bought the kit and decided to make it for her birthday. And, because she likes "soft and snuggly", I decided to back it with minky - deep pile, textured minky. 
If you know anything about quiltmaking, you will recognize that this quilt design is far from simple. It's a Mariner's Compass, which is well known for being a complex quilt block, or in this case, the whole quilt top. It lends itself best to foundation paper piecing (fpp), as I did for the Christmas Star table topper, as well as the Sailor's Delight block I used in both the Bluenose II Pixel quilt and Audacious, which use variations of the Mariner's Compass. But for this quilt, that would have required huge pieces of paper to complete it. Instead, the pattern provided paper templates, many of which took up more than one sheet of paper and had to be taped together. 
I wasn't that impressed with the fabric choices in this kit. The pattern was designed for nautically-themed fabric, and some of this fabric was floral-themed. And some had these funky circles, which, while from the same line as the floral fabric, didn't seem to coordinate that well. And I didn't think there was enough contrast between the fabrics used for the mid-sized compass points. The pattern called for a different background fabric between the small compass points, and I actually considered switching out the black there. But this was the kit my daughter had chosen, and I decided to assemble it according to the kit. The only change I made was to add the narrow black border to tame down the checkerboard border as I felt it was competing with the main design of the quilt top. Plus I prefer to have an unpieced border to attach the binding to, so that the binding doesn't cover up any of the piecing. And I'm very happy with how it turned out.
As for assembling the quilt top, when you have so many points coming together in the middle of a circle, you have a lot of bias edges and a lot of bulk, and it's hard to keep the centre flat. In this case, not only was the centre of the quilt top not flat, I had a mini mountain. I tried pressing it out, using lots of starch, but I ended up having to take in the centre seams to make a flat quit top. And success! I was finally happy with how the quilt top turned out. 
Now for the quilting. Because the fabric was more floral-themed and not at all nautical, I considered naming the quilt "Garden Sundial" and using a floral pantograph. Yes, I've talked about my indecisiveness before... But I decided to stick with the more nautical theme and quilted it with Dave's Seashells and kept the pattern name, "Beachcomber". 

 As I mentioned, the minky backing had a deep, textured pile. 

And that meant a lot of fibres pulled through to the front with the quilting. 

It also meant lots of free floating fibre, especially when I was trimming the batting and backing.

But once the edges were encased in binding, that problem was solved.
And my daughter is very happy with her quilt. And so is one of her cats, who also really loves snuggly blankets.