blue tiles quilt

Taa daah, a finished quilt finally. Here is my Blue Tiles Quilt, an FO, and not a moment too soon. I made this queen sized quilt as a graduation present for my sister, who is graduating from college THIS weekend. It's always good to have a deadline to actually get something done. I'm posting here with the hopes that she's not looking, I don't think she is.

This is a quilt of my own design. I used an improvisational approach, starting with the center medallion and then randomly piecing strips around it. I was initially stressed about flying so freeform but was really happy once I could see that things were going to work out. The dark blue panel in the middle is a tablecloth from Turkey and parts of the rest of the tablecloth are in the border. As for the other fabrics, I've used batiks, Kaffe Fassett prints and stripes, Amy Butler, Liberty, Olympus, and some dupioni silk. I initially thought that I would use more silk but because of the its shreddiness I felt the need to finish the edges of the silk seams. That really slowed me down and meant some low level swearing.

Royal blue is my sister's color and the Turkish tablecloth that was loitering in my closet started telling me that I needed to make a quilt out of it. My biggest challenge was finding enough fabric that fell within the warm blue range to go with the tablecloth, there seems to be a whole lot of teal and greenish blues out there.

I used sashiko to highlight parts of the animals and geometric shapes that were in the tablecloth. I'm realizing that I wish I had taken more detail pictures of the border, which is my favorite part of the quilt and of the little sashiko haikus. It's too late now to take more pics because it's dark and the plane leaves in the early a.m.

The back of the quilt is a nice batik. My friend who machine quilted this for me really did a tremendous job. She outlined the designs in some places and gave it a cool basket weave texture in the border. I really couldn't be happier with how this turned out. If my sister doesn't show a proper amount of ooh-ing and aah-ing over this I may have to disown her.