Quilt festival 2013 - my dresden quilt.

Amy is again hosting the fabulous quilt festival. I think this is among the highlights of the year quilting wise – I’m always amazed by the amount of wonderful, inspirational quilts that are displayed and are looking forward to browsing this year’s quilts.

 

My contribution this time is a quilt that I started this spring and finished a few months back – a Dresden quilt.

 

Facts:

Size 80x60 inches

Methods: piecing, appliqué, machine and hand quilted

Fabric: scraps and basically just various  fabrics from my shelf

The initial idea came about when I wanted to use my black/white fabrics and spice it up with pops of color in a rainbow quilt. At the same time I wanted to embrace the classical Dresden in a modern setting. I'd seen a picture of something like it in one of Katy Doughty's books but i wanted to make it different. In the process of making this quilt, I will admit there were times where I wasn't so sure that it was such a good idea anyway. Luckily the story had a happy ending and I love how it turned out in the end.

As usual a little bit of planning ahead might have been a good idea, but I just jumped right into it and without much more than just a vague idea of the direction. The rainbow quilt didn't really happen except on the back, but then that's life. It rarely go as planned :)

Some of the background is fabric my son gave me - very graphic fabric just like kids love it - cows, zebras, forks and spoons. I’ve had it for a few years and honestly struggled with how to use it. Making it part of the background was a good solution. He sees it but it’s not too obvious. I also got to use a lot of black and white scraps and various fabrics from the shelf. In general, there's very little planned about this quilt. It's sort of made go-with-what-you-got-and-do-what-you-feel-like approach.  

 

The quilt is both machine quilted and handquilted. 

For the binding I selected a black/white border with dots so it frames the quilt and still mixes in with the background. The background is just a plain polka got dark grey with a rainbow.

This quilt was a fun and creative journey :)

 

Join in the fun:

 

Though most are not in this Quilt Festival to win, but to share inspration, there are tons of sponsers who are kindly giving away prices for both category winners and for Viewers Choice.  A huge thank you to all sponsors and to Amy for making the festival a reality once again.