Blogger's Quilt Festival

This week starts the Fall 2017 edition of the Bloggers Quilt Festival, and I have decided to participate too and share one of my most recent, most favourite finishes and one a few of you will have seen here before, my "Queen of the May" quilt.

On my last trip to Melbourne I visited Somerset Patchwork and fell in love with Karen's quilt 'Circle of Sisters' that was on display in the shop.
It was such a bright recreation of a vintage quilt. The blocks were on a wonderful yellow cheddar background, the whole quilt simply glowed, and I've always loved the idea of making a quilt one day on something so bright too.
And so back in January this year I jumped right in!

Inspired by Kathy from materialobsession and her use of contemporary fabrics with traditional designs, I've been experimenting more lately, mixing and matching bright fabrics from my scrap basket. I used a template set  "queen of the May" from way back, it was my favourite block from an earlier Material Obsession BOM quilt that I made.

The 'printonprints' effect is quite wild and colourful, and a fun way to go! It's such a very different direction from where I would usually go, and the hardest thing was not to make them all too nicely co-ordinated.

Choosing my background fabric also proved tricky. After quite a few days of experimenting with different borders, different sashings and different settings, I ended up using the lovely Victoria Findlay Wolfe yellow floral, Elise Mostly Manor. Such a riot of busy happy colour!

As I made up the blocks and trialled them on the yellow background they seemed to get a bit lost on it. So what to do? Then I had a light bulb moment ... ric rac.
I've seen ric rac used on some quilts before - Rachaeldaisy from 'blue mountain daisy' has used ric rac in some very inspiring ways on her lovely quilts. So off I went to 'Spotlight' (it's similar to 'Jo Anns' I think), and bought a few metres of blue ric rac. 

- close up of the beautiful machine quilting by Leeanne from quiltmekiwi

I really enjoyed making this quilt, from making all the wild fabric choices right through to the traditional construction. You can read lots more about my inspiration details and decision dilemmas from an earlier post here  - it is my most popular post so far.

Pop on over here to amyscreativeside for a look at all the festival quilts,

it's a great way to discover and follow new quilting blogs too.