I am happy to have a new finish to share and a sunny day in which to photograph it!  We are in the midst of a dark and dreary spell here in New England but the sun is out this morning and the sky is a beautiful blue. I grabbed my Celebration quilt and drove over to my friend’s yard to take these pictures.

I designed this quilt as a stash buster for my solid scraps a FQ or smaller in size. I used a number of colors here, probably about a dozen.  I mocked up the design in my EQ8 software in both warm tones and cool tones. I loved it in the blues and greens and purples too but decided that I would prefer to work with these warm colors during the dreary winter.  Maybe I will have to make the cool version when I am feeling too hot this summer!

I like this photo of the quilt because I feel like it accurately depicts the atmosphere.  It’s obviously January here with the long shadows and brown grass, but the sun is hitting the quilt making it an unexpected dash of color in the landscape.

This quilt is what I call large scale paper piecing because the foundations are large, making fabric placement a little bit more challenging but yielding this modern, graphic design.  I love the challenge!  In this quilt, I explored the way the blocks meet at the seam line, turning some shapes into others.  For example, two triangles become a diamond at the seam line, and two half hexies become a hexagon.  There is variety in the placement of the blocks and colors suggesting alternate gridwork but the quilt is made from a repeated block.

I thought that the shapes scattered on the background fabric looked a lot like confetti but there are several Confetti quilts out there so I decided to name this quilt Celebration instead. I think it suits the quilt because it feels happy to me with all that color.

The background fabric is a light pink, kind of adding to the all over glow and warmth of the quilt. I quilted in lines spaced about 1/4″ apart. I used mainly soft pink Aurifil 50 weight thread to match the background but added in scattered lines of stitching in two other shades of Aurifil 40 weight, a watermelon color and a soft nutmeg color. This time, I tried a cotton poly blend batting. Normally I used 100% cotton but I am exploring batting choices a little bit more this year to see if I like anything else better or not.

This quilt finished at 60″ x 64″.

I am working on putting this pattern together as a pdf only pattern due to the number of pages of foundations. I hope that it will be available within the next couple of weeks.