I just finished this bright and cheerful quilt made with lovely batiks and offering a nice break from the blah of winter 🙂
I got the idea from a quilt that Kimberley Einmo was doing in an online class so I adapted it to my own preferences (i.e. a lot less piecing, different quilting style and I added appliquéd words to mine!).
I don’t normally go for batiks for a few reasons: they tend to feel stiffer than regular quilting cottons, the prints aren’t usually my style, and they have more of a “polished” feel, especially when I’m quilting them. I loved the aqua batik background of the original idea quilt though and when I got lucky and found a very similar fabric on sale I grabbed it. I definitely wanted the yellow and while I wasn’t completely sold on the orange I agreed it was needed to compliment the other two and create more interest so I conceded and threw it in. Looking at it now I know it would have fallen flat with just yellow 🙂
Kimberley’s had a small partial sunshine in every 9 inch block and I wanted more wide open space and a lot fewer pieced blocks so the colors would be more like accents on the blue rather than the main repeating focus.
Once I figured out where I wanted my sunshine sections, I knew it needed words, because words on a quilt just change everything for the better!
People experienced with using the Dresden plate piecing design will undoubtedly wonder why I have partial rays of sunshine along the edges rather than the full ones that would typically result from using either one quarter or one half of the dresden plate. I could just let you imagine that I was taking creative license here and doing my own thing because that’s more interesting than explaining that I was adapting a ruler to suit my desired shape and had to fudge a bit on the spacing to get it just right! That takes creativity, people (and a few other words that I might have uttered during the process but won’t share here …)
In addition, I noticed in a previous post a few days back that I mentioned sharing pictures of a couple of baby quilts I had done with star patterns in them and I never did post them, so I’m adding them here just in case anyone has been waiting for them …
I might do stars again, you never know 🙂
(Sunshine quilt: original design, Ann Walsh Quilting)
Ann Walsh Quilting 