Finished in 2011 No. 9

This quilt was a project. Not because it was particularly difficult or complex but because I wanted to do it just right. Last summer I found a fabric that I loved. It is the light blue fabric with the big red/orange poppies on it. I bought over 2 yards from fabric.com. I then proceeded to look at different patterns (and buy coordinating fabric for the patterns) until I finally found this quilt pattern in the Winter 2011 edition of 'Quilts & More' magazine. Unfortunately this pattern is not available online but they have plenty of others available at the online magazine. It is quickly becoming one of my favorite sources for quilting inspiration. Anyhow, I eventually picked out all the fabrics I wanted for this quilt.....it ended up more blue than I had originally intended but it came together well. I had enough of the different coordinating fabrics left-over to piece together a back. In some ways I think the back is my favorite part! (And I still had enough left to make another quilt top but that is for another post!) I'm planning to hang this quilt initially. Either in the living room or master bedroom, I'm still deciding. I'm sure we'll use it some day but for now I wanted it to liven up my walls. It is quite large, 70x70 inches.

Since it was so big the quilting took me a long time. First I had to decide how to quilt it. I knew it was going to be too big to do random all-over quilting (and I couldn't settle on a thread color for that anyhow). I ended up using three different types of quilting (and yes, I haven't trimmed all the threads yet but I'm still going to call it 'done'):

First I did free-hand spirals in the center of each of the white setting blocks. This was inspired by the quilting in the pattern I was using. I did not quilt the white 1/2 squares around the edge, I may go back and do them someday, for now I couldn't decide how,

Then I did straight lines that criss-crossed through the big blue squares. These were probably the easiest,

And finally, around the outer border I did straight lines approximately 3" apart. This required lots of starts & stops, for which I was very thankful to have an automatic tie off and an automatic scissors function on my sewing machine. Whew!