Blogger's Quilt Festival Part 2

The Blogger's Quilt Festival at Amy's Creative Side is a chance to see hundreds of beautiful quilts, each one a favourite of its creator. I've decided to join the fun and enter two of mine. One is my Swoon Monster Quilt in the home machine quilted category.

This quilt is in the scrap quilt category.

My DD had asked me to make a quilt for our guest room, the colours to be pink and brown to echo the colours in some art prints on the wall. I'll be honest, I had never thought of using those colours! We started collecting scraps and fat quarters , and before long I was happy with the colour choices.

I knew I wanted it to be scrappy and started making  bordered squares in different sizes. I spent a whole quilt retreat on it. Days and days of boxes. Fortunately by some fluke I made the boxes in sizes that would fit together: 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10 inch. Fitting them together into an arrangement that I liked took some time, but finally it came together.

My friend commented that the quilt made her think of chocolate ice cream, and so we called it Neapolitan.

There's more strawberry than chocolate anyway! 

I quilted it on my home machine in a pattern called orange peel. The backing is from Connecting Threads with a pattern exactly like that same quilting pattern. The dark brown border is actually pink dots on brown and the outer border was the first fabric that we got, that inspired us in the first place. The binding is Kona, I can't remember which brown.

The quilt measures 88" by 96"

I hope you will enjoy browsing all the great quilts in the Blogger's Quilt Festival. I know I will!

Blogger's Quilt Festival

I'm sure that by now you know that the Blogger's Quilt Festival is on at Amy's Creative Side. It's fun to browse a different category every day (or every few hours!). While admiring the quilts today, I decided to enter two of my favourites. This is my first time entering, and I'm excited!

The first quilt I'm entering is in the  favourite home machine quilted category, and it is my Enormous Swoon Quilt. A lot of the fabrics I used are from the Gypsy Bandana line, so I toyed with names like Swooning Over a Gypsy and so on, but due to its size it got called The White Elephant. I blogged about this quilt here, and here, and various other posts along the way.

Today I set off to take some more pictures of it. I really should have checked the batteries in the camera. Perhaps taking two dogs wasn't the best idea. Maybe I should have taken pictures before the first snowfall too. The bright sunshine made pictures hard. No more excuses!

Since I entered in the home quilted category, I'll tell you a bit about the quilting. This quilt is a lot of firsts: first quilt-as-you-go, first feathers. Really that's the reason it took me so long to finish - I knew what I wanted to do, but was scared to try! Each of the Swoon blocks was sandwiched and quilted in a geometric pattern that echoed the star. I used a colour to match the star in each case. Then I joined them together with the white sashing, and quilted feathers on all the white strips larger than 1 inch. Angela Walters' class on Etsy was my savior there.

Here are a few closeups of my quilting:

One last picture of my favourite quilt:






Quilt stats:

fabric: Gypsy Bandana by Pillow and Maxfield, and other coordinating fabrics
size: 100" by 105"
backing: randomly placed left over from the front
binding: diagonal rainbow stripes
quilted by me

Now I'm going to view some more quilts at the Blogger's Quilt Festival. So much to see!