Quilt festival spring 2014 - the Japanese garden

Yeah! It’s festival time again.  A huge thank you to Amy and to all the sponsors for making this fantastic event a reality once again. I am really looking forward to be on this 'quilt cruise' for the next couple of weeks visiting lots of new blogs seeing fantastic creations from all over the world.

This is my submission to the small quilt group (which I just fit into with this quilt  at 60x 60 inches. 

I never name my quilts but DH said the circular quilting reminded him of a Japanese garden, and the name just seemed very appropriate, so that's what I call it. To be honest 'Japanese garden' also sounds a lot better than the '9 degree needle-turn fan quilt'

The facts:
Fabrics: Lots of Kate Spain fabrics, linen, thick luscious dark blue fleece as backing, 80/20 batting.
Techniques: Dresden 9 degree wedges, needle-turn appliqué, machine quilted at home using QAYG.
Time: I started it in middle of March 2014 and finished on in the beginning of May.

The process:

As usual I had one plan when I started and it ended up  very different from what I thought it would be. I sort of winged it though from start to finish without much of a plan.

I originally set out to make a string quilt using scraps, but as you know scraps requires a bit of overview and a clear mind... and unfortunately neither my sewing room or myself had those virtues in March. On the top shelf however I found a decent Kate Spain leftover pile.  Love the colors and decided to make a string quilt with that instead of real scraps. I even cut all the strips, and then realized I didn't really feel for the traditional project anyway. So with my pile of strips, I zoomed into fan quilts instead. With a 9 degree ruler I made big wedges, which ended up in 16 quarter fans.

I hand appliqued all the fans on linen and quilted it densely to the batting with QAYG in circles. The quilting is very subtle on the pictures - it's hard to see it but up close it's very visible and it gives the quilt a lovely texture.

And finally, I leave you with an indoor picture without wind  and disorting sunlight

Anyway. enough about this quilt. Thank you for stopping by :) Now get on out of here and look at some of the other bloggers quilt festival entries: