Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2011

Today I am taking part in Amy's fabulous Blogger's Quilt Festival. This is the 4th time I have taken part and it is always a highlight of the year for me. Once you have seen my quilt head on over to the festival and take a look at all the other amazing, inspiring quilts on show. I should have a button on my sidebar by the time you read this!

I have just finished the quilt I am making for my son Felix's 21st birthday! Regular readers will have been following the progress of this quilt but I will just fill in any Quilt Festival visitors.

My son has spent way too much of his short life sitting in from of a computer screen, especially an Apple Mac, so this design is based on the colour picker tools that you use on the computer.

I got the idea from a brainstorming session with my younger son, Jacob, and my husband, Jonathan, where I showed them lots of quilts on Flickr and in books. They both liked the quilts with all solids like Lynne's Penguin book quilt, and then Jacob came up with the idea of the colour picker. I was so pleased because I realised this would be very simple to make!
I also love the fact that we all had a hand in designing the quilt.

I bought 4 different Kona charm packs and some charcoal and snow and got to work playing with the colours. You can read more about this part here.
Jonathan thought it would be a great idea to finish the top as if it was a classic Mac screen, so we did some research. This is sort of what we were aiming at...


Jonathan did get a bit involved with the accuracy, working out the exact font used and scaling it up to the correct size. But I did have to explain that I didn't really care if my black lines were the correct number of pixels or not!
I wasn't too sure about this idea originally so I didn't commit to it with the piecing and ended up needle-turn appliqueing the strips on afterwards. We realised we should have a word in the middle so decided to put 'Felix'. I was worried it might look a bit naff, so I just quilted it in 6 strands of grey embroidery silk, and I think it is just subtle enough!

And then in another departure from accuracy, Jonathan thought Felix would love a rainbow Apple logo in the top corner. And I thought it would be such a fun thing to make - I was right! This was strip pieced then hand appliqued again.

When it came to quilting I knew I had to hand quilt. I always do this for my family 'heirloom' quilts. I just wouldn't feel I had put enough effort in if I had machined! Also I do love to hand quilt, as you can see ...

So I quilted with regular cotton in the ditch of the colour squares with an echo square. Then I used perle 8 in as matching a shade as I could manage (thanks Liz Allen for the extra, lighter colours!), in the snow sashing, with bigger more 'sashiko' stitches.

I had plenty of Kona charm squares left to make a rainbow stripe down the back. The binding is charcoal.

Look at all those stitches! I reckon the hand quilting took about 30 hours.

I am SO pleased with the way this turned out! Such a simple but brilliant idea and I KNOW Felix is going to love it. He has been away travelling in India and the Far East with his girlfriend, Emma, for nearly 9 months now. He is due back in June, but his birthday is not till August. But now I can put the quilt away safely finished. And I just know that he NEVER reads my blog!!

Don't forget to head on over to the Bloggers Quilt Festival. And thanks so much Amy, for hosting this wonderful event again!