Mums for my Mum - Blogger's Quilt Festival entry

I just finished a quilt that is for my mom and her new husband - "Mums for Mum", and I'm entering it into the Fall 2013 Blogger's Quilt Festival at Amy's Creative Side that just happens to be this week!

I have been collecting chrysanthemum print fabrics for a few years now - mostly half yard cuts - 28 different prints in this quilt! I have plans for a Bargello Mums and another patchwork mum quilt with the large amount of scraps from this project - yay! It's hard to give this one away, but I can think of a better cause than my own Mum. And I can keep the next one...

The pattern is called "Twinkle" from Sew Be It. I saw a finished one on display at Back Porch Fabrics in Pacific Grove, CA. I love Pacific Grove - we've been going a couple times a year lately to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and go tide pooling at Asilomar State Beach and just hang out at our cheap and funky (but clean) motel adjacent to the butterfly grove. There's a great yarn store there too (Monarch Knitting). Anyway - the sample was made with all Kaffe Fassett prints, and a few of my mums are KF too, and all the prints together are a riot of color - so I knew what I'd been stockpiling mums for at that moment!

I built each block with some light/dark contrast and then pieced them so that you can see sort of large pinwheel shapes alternating across the quilt. It came out fairly subtle since there are a lot of mid-range prints among my mums. But I like movement in such a bright "printy" quilt and I think I got what I was trying to achieve.

I'm not terribly accomplished as a quilter, so this large quilt was a bit ambitious for me. I quilted it in 2 pieces and then attached them together. The quilting itself is a mix of hand quilting the center stars for each block, then using concentric organic wavy outline around the stars by freehand using my machine.  There are a lot of imperfections that I'm not very happy about - but since the overall effect is really cool I will call it a success.  

The binding was cut from a Marimekko scrap that I got at the Crate and Barrel Outlet store - they sell scraps for $0.50 each and you can pull out pretty good sized pieces if you fish through the bins.  The yardage is a great buy too, but I don't remember exact price. This piece was simple blocks of reds from light to a dark burgundy. I attached by machine and then handstitched to the back.

This quilt makes me so happy! I hope it brings joy and light and warmth to my mom and her new husband for many many years to come. (I love you, mom!)