Gifted: Wedding quilt

This project has also been finished for a couple of weeks but it's taken me this long to finally blog about it. Trying to get better, I promise! This was a wedding gift for my friends, a couple I lovingly refer to as the Bradys due to their menagerie at home (animals, not kids) and their names being Cindy and Bobby. They planned a very small wedding over the summer and I only heard about it a couple of weeks before it happened, so it's not an issue that this was a belated wedding gift. They got it before Christmas, which was my plan!

The quilt is about 54" square and made entirely out of Laura Gunn's Lantern Bloom fabrics (LOVE!) and is based off this pattern, although I made quite a few adjustments. First, I changed the background so that it was made up of 9" (finished) blocks of varying widths. I wanted to use the half yards I'd purchased more effectively, and I wanted to really show off these prints, because I think they're made to be used big.

For the tree, I used another of those Moda Bella Solids (also LOVE!). I drew the tree on some fusible web, fused it to the brown, cut out the tree, and fused it to the quilt. I then quilted just inside the edge using brown quilting thread so that I could outline the shape and add reinforcement (my web didn't stick all that well, even with the help of a hot steam iron). After that, I fused web to a large patch of the red lanterns on cream fabric, cut out a bunch of lanterns, and placed them wherever seemed right on the tree. I like this effect better than doing the 3D lanterns the pattern calls for. I think this quilt will be used, and I think the fused lanterns make it more useable than the appliquéd ones.

I quilted the background in an all-over scribbly curlicue stipple, avoiding the tree and lanterns, but stitching around each lantern, just inside the raw edge. I bound the entire thing in the stripe from the line. The photos were taken at night after I presented the quilt to the happy couple (after a very rushed wash-and-dry) so they aren't the greatest. This whole daylight-savings thing is throwing me off, and only lets me take halfway decent photos on the weekends, which isn't always an option! Anyway, I'm really happy with the final product, even though the photos are kinda dark. Rob was very impressed with it as well, saying he thought it was my best work to date. I'm not sure I agree, but I do think it's up there...

More pictures of the quilt and the pieced back on my Flickr page.