30 Pearls {Finished Quilt}

Happy birthday to me and hip hip hooray for another finish!

My modern-themed quilt for our June Island Batik Ambassador challenge is finished! You can see the first two posts on this quilt here and here.

I finished the binding and trimmed all of the lose threads last night and am going to hang it up in my sewing room later today!

As I explained in my original post, there are 30 "pearls" to celebrate my 30th birthday (today!), pearls are my birthstone, and pearl is a traditional 30th anniversary gift.

I quilted free motion pebbles in each pearl with white Aurifil. In the backgrounds I used five different shades -- hot pink, red, dark coral, orange, and purple -- to quilt the different filler motifs. I used 56 different filler motifs inspired by Leah Day's quilting gallery! It required quite a bit of starting and stopping, which I don't normally like to do when I quilt, but it was 100% worthwhile for this quilt to be exactly as I had envisioned.

The binding and hanging pocket are of a cream Island Batik print that is slightly darker than my pearls. I had originally pulled a purple fabric for the binding but I didn't have quite enough fabric for that. In the below picture, you can really make out some of the quilting with the orange thread!

For the whole quilt, I used white thread in the bobbin so that I didn't have to change both the top thread and the bobbin every time I needed to switch between colors (which was a lot!). The texture on the backing is just so fun! I managed to keep my pieced backing nearly perfectly square with the top, which is a miracle for me!

I will try to post some close up pictures of some of my favorite quilted sections on Instagram over the weekend. Using Leah Day's gallery as my inspiration was a great starting point however I had to think through how to quilt some of the designs in the arcs! Some were easier than others to "bend" into the arched spaces -- like the meandering type motifs and feather type motifs -- than others! There were a few that I decided would only work in the full squares rather than in the arches, which worked out well.

This project is a rarity in that I both designed and made it for me for fun. I enjoy and love just about all of the quilting that I do but I don't often make something "just for me" and it was a nice change of pace to be completely selfish with this project and be finicky about every detail without worrying about writing a pattern to go along with it.

As always, a big yippee hooray thank you to Island Batik for providing these fabrics for me each month to play with and to stretch my creativity! I love our modern challenge month as Amabassadors and this might be my favorite Ambassador project of all of the things I have made in the last 18 months!

Quilt Stats:
Name: 30 Pearls
Design: self designed, essentially randomly spaced drunkard's path blocks
Fabrics: Sunflower Serenade from Island Batik
Size: 42 inches square
Quilting: pearls: pebbles in white Aurifil;
     background: 56 different motifs inspired by Leah Day in pink, purple, red, orange, and dark coral Aurifil
Started: April 2018
Finished: June 2018

Have a wonderful weekend!