Flower Power is finished!

I am so happy to have finally finished it, yes it is all finished.

This little quilt started with  BOM blocks that I had made/exchanged in 2010-2011 -  a real UFO! I digged the blocks out a few weeks/months ago with the idea of making a present for my Grand-Mum's 85th birthday. My Grand-Mum had a huge garden all her life with lots of flowers and now she can't go in the garden, I thought it would be nice to give her a maintenance-free indoor garden!

Looking at my 20 sampler blocks 6' finished I knew I needed to add to them if I wanted anything bigger than a table runner, So I settled on a on-point layout with some filler blocks (euh 20 of them!).

And I ended up with an awkward sizes centre top that I framed on the sides with a white strip.

Next step was to decide on the borders and that wasn't an easy task. The first attempt (on paper) didn't work because of the awkward size of my quilt top. And then I thought it would be nice to use some Granny square blocks. So I made some 9' Granny square blocks for the corners and some 6' blocks for the borders.

The blocks were framed with the floral fabrics to make them into a 9' border

I thought I would keep the quilting simple in the interest of time and started by quilting in the ditch around the central blocks. But then what to do in the negative space of my filler blocks? Feathers of course. Did I plan to keep it simple? I had never done feathers until then but never mind, I decided to give it a try.

I also made it personal, adding "Mamie" "85" and "2014" in one of the squares.
And for the borders, I did some simple stippling

some waves

some 8s

and some flowers

I love the back of the quilt too!

I choose a deep pink binding as I think it will more practical to use (more stain friendly than white anyway) and I like how it framed the quilt. And in the interest of time, I stitched the binding entirely by machine.

So my quilt won't win any competition but this is not why I made it. The piecing is not perfect, the quilting is not perfect (especially the feathers), there is even some pickering, but I am very happy I have finished it and also very proud of it. Proud because my little pile evolved into a large bright happy quilt, proud because I tried to quilt some feathers and I love the texture it gives to the quilt. And finally proud because this has been a real labour of love which I hope will brighten my Grand-Ma's life just a little as she is so sad to have lost her soul-mate of 65 years earlier this year.

And of course this is my first OPAM this month and the first item of my Lazy Bums Round 3 list!

Quilt stats:
Floral fabrics: assortment of fabric from Hofman Fabrics (2003)
Background fabric: White on white (several) from my stash
Backing and binding fabric: Raspberrry fabric
Size: 54' x 60'
Machine pieced and machine quilted with Aurifil.
Started February 10, finished Aug 14

Linking to Anything Goes Monday, I Quilt Thursday, Needle and Thread Thursday, Q3 Finish Along, A lovely Year of Finishes.
Celine