Quilting Godstone Grannies AKA Good Golly Miss Mollie

The quilting of Good Golly Miss Mollie is well underway. This quilt is my interpretation of the Godstone Grannies quilt which is at the Quilt Museum in York, England. You can see the original and read about it here. The name of my version of the quilt comes from Mollie Simmonds who was the leader of the group that made the original quilt in the early 1960s.

I've made oodles of hexagon quilts and usually have a pretty good idea as to how to quilt them on my domestic sewing machine (a Juki TL2010Q) but this one was a bit of a challenge because there is a variety of blocks and they can be quite different from one another. There are 31 whole diamonds in the quilt one of which is unique (the block in the centre) and the rest are pairs of blocks. There are also 4 pairs of half diamonds on the sides and 5 pairs of partial diamonds at the top and bottom. The colour is not right in this picture - it looks quite grey but in fact it is more buttery and peachy.

Normally I ditch quilt first, then quilt the border, bind the quilt and then go back and quilt the blocks. So what are the challenges? This quilt is entirely hand pieced using the English paper piecing method so ditch quilting isn't my preferred option. The second challenge is that the border is very narrow which means I'll have to quilt the partial blocks all around the quilt before I can bind it.

My solution was to quilt melon wedges in each of the path hexagons. I like this method because it creates a nice little start and there are relatively few starts an stops. This is a little bit of what it looks like. It isn't perfect - far from it but I'm not at all bothered because I know that once the whole thing is quilted the little imperfections will disappear! It also works the same as ditch quilting which stabilizes the quilt so that I can quilt the border and bind the quilt before quilting the diamond blocks.

What to do with the rest of the blocks? I don't like marking so I want to do as little of it as possible. I decided to work with the shapes created within the diamonds and use them as my inspiration for the quilting! Here is the same side block quilted! I quilted the orange rosette and its centre and then the four partial orange rosettes along the bottom edge. Then it was onto the feather swags on the side followed by the small swag below the orange rosette! I'm a happy quilt maker. I'll quilt the second partial block that is the same as this one in the same manner! That's two done and lots more to go!

Now that I have an idea about how to quilt the blocks I will ditch quilt the outside edge of the quilt where the hexagons were appliqued to the border strips and I'll quilt the border. I like close straight lines so I think that's what I'll do! When I've got it done I'll share pictures of the border quilting!

Until I post again happy sewing!
Karen H