Bloggers' Quilt Festival Entry : 'Happy'

After a year's break from entering Amy's twice yearly Bloggers' Quilt Festival I'm back, this time with my quilt, "Happy", made for a Quilting Expo at my local Spotlight store.

There were three 'firsts' associated with this quilt, starting with the fact that this was my first entry into a quilt competition.

The rules stipulated that only Spotlight-bought fabrics could be used, and, as you can imagine, I was devastated that I had to buy more fabric (said no quilter ever lol). 

A huge variety of fat quarters in tone-on-tone rainbow colours gave me the stash I needed to start cutting out teardrop shapes and fusing them onto a solid background of Spotlight's Prima homespun in white.

First I created the wreath shape in the centre, then the lines of colourful leaves at the top and bottom of the quilt.

Then I pinned and pinned, sandwiching my quilt with a double layer of poly batting. No, I hadn't forgotten to stitch the appliqué. I raw-edge appliqueed the shapes and quilted around them in the one process. 

Then came the fun part - free motion quilting all that white space!

A few months before this I had taken an online Craftsy class on free motion quilting feathers with Angela Walters but, apart from endless small practice pieces, I had never used my newly acquired (rudimentary!) domestic machine free motion quilting skills on a proper quilt.

I took a very deep breath and embarked on another 'first'!

I've always dreamed of quilting feathers, feathers and more feathers, so I might have gone a tad over the top with this quilt running through my Bernina 1230.

Taking photos to show the texture of this quilt still makes me happy, as does running my hands over those feathers.

And I won! In a most surprising way. You can read about it in this blog post. 

I'm entering 'Happy' in the Home Machine Quilted Quilt category, so please pop over there and take a look at the other entries. 

That's also the page where, from this Friday 22nd May, you can vote for your favourite quilts in this category. 

Or nominate a quilt for Viewers Choice here. 

Amy's Bloggers' Quilt Festival always attracts lots of gorgeous quilts, and there is so much to see on her blog in all the other categories too.

A huge thank you to Amy for such a mammoth undertaking that regularly brings happiness to so many of us!