Ta-da!

Here it is.

This is the quilt I designed and made for a customer’s parents’ 50th anniversary.  I posted the draft of this quilt about a month ago, here.  I put a ton of hours in last week and got it done at 2:30 am the morning of the anniversary party, which was last Saturday.  Phew!  I told you I work well under pressure!

I had never made a photo transfer quilt before.  When I was first thinking about how to approach the challenge of a photo quilt, my first objective was to come up with a unified design.  Photo quilts can sometimes look thrown together with so many different sizes, subjects and themes.  This design came to me immediately after looking at the photos of this family.  It all just fell in to place.

The anniversary couple suggested the red and blue theme, but I couldn’t resist adding an assortment of cream fabrics to the mix.  I just love the scrappy look and the more fabrics used, the better, in my opinion.  I think it gives added interest.

I was a little perplexed as to how I was going to quilt this thing.  I couldn’t bring myself to quilt over the photo fabric.  It seemed rude to quilt over a face!  So, I quilted in every star point and in then in the cream alternate blocks, I came up with a quilting design by first marking a diamond shape around each small center blue star and then drawing feathers around the shape.  I liked how it turned out.  It made for an even amount of quilting, which is important for a wall quilt.

I’m thinking about adding this to the list of patterns to write up someday.  A setting like this that uses 50 stars could be used for or any 50th wedding anniversary or birthday.  It could even be done without photos if one so chooses.

More on the product I used for the photos later…