A Finish!

Snuggle

54 " x 68"

Ta Dah! It's all done. . . well, to flimsy stage anyway. You can see Dunkel is critiquing while DH holds the top up for me. This is an un-retouched photo, and hopefully pretty close to the real color. We're having rain again today, so it wasn't very bright today, but we were having a moment of "lightness" (DH's term), so we quickly took the picture.

The background color is a Cherrywood fabric and I think it's either Indigo or Cobalt. (I lost the label a long time ago!) To me, it's similar to Crayola's Midnight Blue crayon. Anyway, my point is that it's one of my favorite shades of blue. I'm so happy I had a big enough piece in my stash, and it was exactly the color I wanted. (The inspiration quilt is really kind of a navy blue but it's close to this color.) The 9-patches were made with some of the fabrics from two Cherrywood grab bags.

The 9-patches were free-pieced using a number of different methods to achieve that. As I got more of the blocks made, and starting running out of fabric, the 9-patches got wonkier. I think I like the wonkiest ones the best. You can see some close-ups of some of the 9-patches here.

This came out a bigger size than I thought it would, and I'm happy with that. DH is 6 foot tall, and he can hide behind it pretty well, don't you think? It's big enough to really snuggle in!


Here is a close-up shot of my free-pieced letters. The E is actually a lower-case E, but it's hard to see that dark-colored piece that makes it so. It was supposed to be an upper-case E, but I got confused in the middle of making the letter! I suppose I probably shouldn't admit that in public. . . .

And here's a closeup of the border. This was my solution to meld the two fabrics in the borders together. I don't know if you can see it very well in the top photo, but there's the Cherrywood fabric in the right-hand border and the dotted fabric in the left-hand border. The two fabrics go around the corners and then meet in the top and bottom borders. Even though this is subtle, this was what I came up with to avoid just butting them up next to each other. This kind of looks "interlocked" to me.

Due to the size of this quilt top, I won't be quilting this, but sending it to my favorite long-arm quilting artist, Shari. I know she'll do a fabulous job for me.


I really love this quilt, and I'm so happy I took this challenge. A huge "Thanks!" to Tonya for hosting this challenge. And, in spite of my whining and stalling, it was a lot of fun. It made me stretch and learn. After all, that's the point of a challenge. And if you haven't yet visited the blog for the Liberated Amish Challenge, go right now and take a look. There are so many wonderful quilts that everyone has made, and wonderful stories about them.


One last thought. . . . if you have the opportunity to participate in a challenge, I urge you to take it! It's good to challenge yourself, learn what you're capable of, and learn new things.