Monday, September 17, 2018

Blogger's Quilt Festival 2018 {30 Pearls Quilt}

It's a good week to be a quilter -- it's time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival, hosted by Amy's Creative Side!


For this year's edition of the festival, I decided to enter my 30 Pearls quilt.


This quilt is my own original design and was my Island Batik Ambassador project for June, which was our "modern" themed month.

When I was thinking about designing this quilt, I took my inspiration from the fact that I was coming up on my 30th birthday. I decided that I wanted something with 30 simple blocks and it seemed the natural choice to do drunkard's path blocks since my birthstone is pearl.

This was my original design that I mocked up using a few of the fabrics I planned to use. The fabrics for this came from Island Batik's Sunflower Serenade line and used only the pink, red, and purple fabrics.


 I used a set of drunkard's path templates I had from a previous project and the blocks and quilt top came together with ease.



The backing is an extreme contrast from the front -- it's lime green with slice and insert strips of rainbow fabrics added to make the backing big enough.


For the quilting, I quilted pebbles in white Aurifil in each of the white pearls. For each of the print arches or squares, I used a different free motion quilting motif inspired by Leah Day's quilting design gallery. I used 56 different free motion fillers and used five different colors of pink, red, purple, and orange thread.




This quilt now hangs above my sewing machine in my little corner of our guest room. 

This quilt is not larger (42 inches square) but I see it as something I am hugely proud of with how much I worked on the free motion quilting. 



Previous posts on this quilt:
Introduction Post
Quilt Top Post
Finished Quilt Post

21 comments:

  1. I really like how this quilt is tied into your birthday milestone for the year and that you used to expand your free motion quilting skills. It's beautiful and I'm glad you chose to share it again for the festival!

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  2. Love the pinks and the greens. They make a pretty quilt and the pebbles look perfect to me. Wish you a very happy birthday, Alison. Hope you have a blast.

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  3. I envy you, your pebbles look great. Very lovely quilt. Denise @fortheloveofgeese

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  4. What a pretty quilt -- the back provides a fun contrast. And your pearls theme has just given me an idea . . .

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  5. Your birthday quilt is a perfect entry for this festival. The quilting and the contrasting back are my favorite parts!

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  6. I'm impressed that you used a different motif in each of the arcs. Now, since you've had so much practice, you should do another one and do the motifs in the pearls using varigated thread to show them off.
    Pat

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  7. Such a pretty quilt. And, what a great idea to use your 30th birthday/birthstone as inspiration!

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  8. I adore this ... the layout, colors, everything!! :)

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  9. I recognize some of that fabric! It turned out great!

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  10. So pretty! I bet it was fun choosing and trying out so many different designs.

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  11. What a great way to practice free motion designs, not to mention all that curved piecing. I love the fact that the back is so totally different, two quilts in one!

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  12. Love the saturated pinks and purples. What a great way to practice different FMQ design. Looks great!

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  13. This one is a favorite of mine and I'm happy to see it again! Lots of pretty color, and meaningful, too!

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  14. One of my recent favorites. Batiks are just so luminous and that project had such a great color palette.

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  15. I love this birthday celebration! Happy Belated (I guess) and what a great way to celebrate.

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  16. Love the 30th birthday incentive for this quilt. It is definitely a keeper. I love the complete contrast on the back. You can hang both ways....for different seasons. Great Quilt!

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  17. Beautiful quilt - love the batiks and the pebbly quilting is just amazing!

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  18. I love this quilt and always enjoy seeing it. It somehow reminds me of a calendar page.

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