Celtic Dragons

 

Earlier this year, my daughter, grandson and I visited a large fabric store in the city. Damian and I went in search of dragons, and found them in the form of a 6-dragon panel, with Celtic motifs at the top and bottom of the panel.

I purchased the panel, and later decided to continue the Celtic idea, using the Celtic Twist quilt block that I had used in the Tales of Ireland quilt. Since the individual dragon panels were 10" square, I decided to reduce the size of the quilt block to match. 

It made for some relatively small pieces. And it is a rather challenging quilt block. Nevertheless, I made 14 of them. Originally, I had thought to incorporate the Celtic motifs from the panel into the quilt top, but didn't see any way to make that work. I may later make use them in a pillowcase to coordinate with the quilt. 
Damian and I chose colours from the dragons to use in the quilt blocks. He said that he wanted the quilt to be slightly larger than Dancing Snowflakes, that I made him for last Christmas.I used my Quilt Pro 6 design software to plan the layout and calculate yardage. (I purchased my software, but you can now download it for free because they're not making it any more), and included a narrow border of each fabric. I ordered what I was hoping were the best colours online, but when they arrived, the red was more pinkish - definitely not a dragon red. Fortunately, I also had an orange-red in my stash, so we substituted it for the pinkish one.
When we went to the close-out sale at our local quilt shop, we found a thick black minky with an arrow design. They didn't have any of the regular black minky left, or not enough, and I figured since dinosaurs are rather medieval and arrows were used during medieval times, shooting them from slit windows in castle walls, the arrow minky was appropriate. 
The original plan was for this to be a joint project - me making the blocks, and Damian stitching the blocks together. But recently, when I thought about making it for him for Christmas, I didn't want to leave him out if he still wanted to be part of the project. He didn't. So, I went ahead and made it up. 
I've been going to the local Lutheran church for their weekly craft/sew day, and made up the first block there. I like to have one block made, especially for complex blocks, to see how it looks and use it for reference when I make up the remaining blocks. But since it is rather complex, and I tend to get sidetracked by the socialization (I make more mistakes there than I do at home), I decided to finish the quilt top at home, rather than at the church. 
One night when I was having trouble sleeping, I got up and finished the binding on a couple of quilts, and added the first two borders to this one. 

When I got up the following morning, and went downstairs, I was rather startled to discover that one of the links in the quilt top appeared to be glowing. It was an almost perfect square of light from a window in another room, highlighting that one link. 
I chose Irish Swirls as the most Celtic-looking pantograph I own and quilted it with a variegated thread that featured the colours in the quilt top. 

I used a black Glide 60 in the bobbin, so I was close to finishing the quilting before the bobbin ran out. After I changed the bobbin, the top thread broke, so I rethreaded it, did a machine tie-off and started quilting again. And it seemed to be quilting fine without any issues until I was further down the row. That's when it started skipping large areas, so I knew that there was a bobbin issue. Somehow the bobbin thread had come out of the slot/guide (whatever you call it), so I rethreaded it, did another tie-off back before the stitching had started skipping and finished the quilting without further problems. 
While I was attaching the binding, I noticed some of the stitching in the quilting was really loose, so I figured I would have to re-stitch that area. But when I pulled on the loose stitching, the thread kept coming and coming. The entire length of quilting between those two tie-offs had come loose. And it had looked like perfect good quilting. But there apparently was no bobbin thead. What I later concluded was that the bobbin thread must have come loose with that thread break and the upper thread was rather rough-textured, compared to Glide, and that the extra thick minky was holding it in place until I started handling the quilt during binding. 
But now I was left in a quandary as to how I was going to replace all of that quilting. My Red Snappers would not snap over the thickness of the quilt in order to load it back onto the longarm. I don't own corsage pins (except for a few in some corsages that I still have around) and my regular pins were not heavy duty enough for the job. So, I ended up doing the job on my Janome sewing machine. There are a few zigs and zags where they don't belong, but it's really not noticeable unless you're looking for it. 
Finished, thankfully, and ready to gift on Christmas day.