The Big Reveal

Surprise! The "secret" project I've been working on is a quilt for my mom for her birthday! It's this Atkinson pattern and it came together pretty quickly. I used all solid Kona cottons for this one. I was worried about the colors bleeding onto the white when I washed it so I threw in a color catcher, but that turned out to be unnecessary. I love these quality Kona cottons!

Here's one of the border corners. I tried using a little pleated/piped border. I cut it 1", folded it in half, pressed it, and then stitched it on at the same time as the outer blue border. So the pleat finishes at 1/4". It turned out pretty well, I think.

I am loving these long shots down my quilts. This is what those paint strip-looking pieces turned into. Pretty cool.

For the quilting, after much discussion at the quilt shop one Saturday, it was decided that it would be good if I stitched in the ditch around each large square and then treated each square as its own canvas and do some free-motion sampling in each. One is stippled, two have large flowers, one is a spiral, one is a square spiral, one is a maze-like meander... You can see more photos on my Flickr page, although I have not yet uploaded shots of the quilting in each blocks. I will try to do that this weekend. But below is my favorite free-motion block, and the reason why I did it all : I [heart] my mom. I just hope she likes the quilt!