My sister-in-law has pretty great taste in home decor stuff so I was fairly nervous when I decided to make her a surprise quilt for her birthday.
At the Melbourne craft show (2011) I found this gorgeous screen printed linen from Duckcloth.
I chose the large scale floral print ("Rose Peacock and Seaweed"), the mergey blobs ("Stoney Peacock"); both shown above, the sticks ("Boardwalk Peacock") and the green and blue dots ("Connect Seaweed on Raw"); both shown below.
I also bought some brown linen from Tessuti in Melbourne and some teal solid cotton from Patchworks in Hobart.
Initially I struggled with these fabrics more than I thought I would. I wanted something to echo the randomy placement (technical term there) of the shapes included in the fabric, but that would also how them off to their best advantage. I wanted one of those super modern bitsy quilts that I love when other people make them, but I really struggled with my inner desires for symmetry and order and matchy matchyness (more technical terms). Eventually (and with my sister-in-law's birthday looming) I decided on the design below.
I am mostly quite pleased with the end result, though some bits please me more than others. I enjoyed the process of making it up and it was a good thing as I wasn't sure on the size required - it could have been for a spare double bed or their king size bed so I had to come up with a size which would work in some way on both. I made it so it would fully cover (but not swamp) the double, or would sit nicely below the pillows on the king.
I was really really pleased with the quilting I decided on - I often just do some stitch in the ditch and then switch to the perle cotton for chunky hand quilting. This time while I included some hand quilting, I also stepped up the machine quilting a bit with lots and lots (and lots!) of parallel lines, almost all in one direction:
I also did some quilting around the flowers (which isn't really displayed that well by the picture below):
and some running stitch straight (yet randomly offset lines) which are somewhat visible below. I love how the blue cotton stands out against the brown linen.
I backed with another solid, this time a kind of lighter bluey green (I think it's called seagrass or similar) which looked great with all the quilting on the reverse. Apparently I only wanted to show you an artsy corner of this...plus a small child's foot which crept into the picture somehow :)
Onto birthday quilt 3 - hopefully in time for early March!
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