Story of a Quilt - The Nebulus Quilt

I fell in love with this quilt as soon as I saw a picture of it. It was designed by an American quilter, Giucy Giuce, to accompany his Inferno fabric collection for Andover Fabrics. As I was stocking the full collection, Makower (the UK distributor of Andover Fabrics) offered the project to me for the magazine (British Patchwork & Quilting) and I jumped at the chance to make it.

And then I realised how big it was!

It's a *BIG* quilt - approx. 110" square - that's big for a king size quilt even; well, by UK sizes but it looked simple enough to make, so I made a start. 

First off, I realised the image and instructions didn't match how the fabric was printed, which actually helped as it made it fat quarter friendly; something that is always easier to kit than cutting long quarters. The instructions also suggested Giucy Giuce's Spectrastic Black fabric be used for the background but seeing as about 7m was needed, I felt this was an expensive option so have used a solid, Kona Black.

There were long seams involved as it's made in vertical strips and it would have been a fairly quick make if I hadn't been distracted with my house move. But it came together nicely working on one strip at a time and I soon had a large quilt top that needed quilting. I would have loved to have hand quilted this quilt but time pressures of needing to put it in the magazine meant that this wasn't going to be possible. Nor was attempting to quilt it on my Janome Atelier, even with its bigger throat space. So I sent it to Trudi Wood and she did a fantastic job quilting for me; exactly how I would have quilted it had I been able. I was so happy with the result.

The quilt backing is made from three different ombre fabrics from the Fresh Hues collection from Robert Kaufman (3m of each!) and Trudi quilted it in assortment of Aurifil threads. The wadding was a Hobbs wool wadding as I wanted this to be a special quilt to go on our new bed. I made a pieced binding by cutting 2.25" strips from the leftover Inferno fabrics and because of the length of the sides, tried machine binding for the first time.

The quilt appeared in the Autumn 2021 issue of British Patchwork & Quilting.

Joanna