Blogger's Quilt Festival - Sunshine

Yay!  It's time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival!  I'm not sure where I'll find the time to browse through the hundreds of entries.  I always add more from each festival of things I need to try and I'm already working on a backlog of patterns.  This isn't helping.  Nonetheless, I'm thrilled to participate.  (I just need to finish my second entry by Monday.  Eek!)

My first entry was completed in January (thus the snowy photo).  My mother requested a twin-sized quilt with rounded corners and picked Bonnie Hunter's Celtic Solstice as a pattern.  Once I calculated the yardage, we met at a fabric store and she picked the colors she wanted.

I never would have pictured my mother selecting browns and blues.  I liked the fabrics she chose and helped her to pick stuff that would contrast similar to Sew Pretty Quilts' version of Celtic Solstice.  Mom confessed later she wasn't too sure of her selections.  But as I started to assemble the blocks, I could see it was going to look great. 

I assembled and quilted it on my old Singer 15-91.  Many of my non-quilting friends struggled to understand how I did all that on a domestic machine.  It took a while to come up with the different quilting designs.  I had a couple of false starts and one backward block:  the swirls on 30 of the suns/flowers go in one direction... and the 31st does not.  I knew about it early on - the odd one was the first or second sun I quilted.  But it looked great, so I left it in.  I know roughly where it is and it still takes me a while to find it.  No one else will ever notice.

I named the quilt Sunshine, because of the backing's color and quilting.  The back!  What a way to name a quilt.  The front and the back appear so different and each have neat stuff to look at.  I particularly like how the border reminds me of cathedral windows on the back, which is not at all how it looks from the front.

I used the backing fabric for the label and tucked it in a corner, sewing it down with the same colored thread. Mom loves the quilting so much, she said she may reverse the quilt in the summer to show off the back.

As much as I enjoyed quilting this thing, there was much swearing, sweating from wrestling it through the sewing machine and pricked fingers (I may have mentioned in at least one prior post).  I nearly named it Blood, Sweat and Swearing.  Sunshine may have top billing, but the second name remains.  It makes me laugh; which is good, because this is a great quilt.

Sunshine is a good sized twin at 74" x 92".  It drapes over the bed beautifully.  After receiving the quilt Mom starting every conversation (or ended every email) with "I love the quilt" for at least six months.  Do you think she liked it?

There are so many awesome quilts over at the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  Be sure to check them out!