Fall Quilt Festival

You must have heard about it! It's time for the Fall Quilt Festival!

Here's my showcase quilt, the famous Character Quilt :)

This quilt is for someone very special in my life, a friend with a 'boy' in front of it.


I collected fabrics that illustrated his interests and hobbies. It was a long and winding road - who would have thought that cheese-fabric is so hard to come by??? (Blogged about here and here.)


Each framed blog represents a hobby or interest, for example:

He likes to cook:


He collects sea shells:


This quilt taught me a lot.

I tried my hands at applique when I couldn't find the fabric I wanted, for example a vinyl record since he likes to collect old records:

I also learned how kind fellow quilters are!

I'd been searching for sheet music fabric everywhere when I saw it in a quilt at a quilt show. The maker of the quilt was there and I asked if she had any scraps left. She sent me the small pieces she had left and I managed to join them into a block:


Then there was Ginny, who gave away some great coffee-themed fabric in a give-away package. I emailed her saying all I needed to win was the coffee fabric, so she sent me some of it (which was great, because I didn't win her give-away - I never win those!!! Boohoo). It made a beautiful block for my espresso-loving BF:


And lastly, I learned a new way of free-motion quilting: pebble-quilting

It was a lot of work, and like everyone says, it uses a lot of thread, but I love the effect, it feels great!

Since a lot of the theme fabric will likely not be used any many other quilts, I added some blocks to the back of the quilt, so now it's somewhat reversible:

I put the final binding stitches in 30 min ago - it's really hard to sew on black binding to black backing fabric using black stitch - lighting is key here. Of course I used Mal's invisible ladder stitch for the binding, the link is in my Quilty How To's menu on the right.

This will be one great birthday gift next month!

Now let's see your quilts!