Christmas Challenge

This year's challenge theme was, "What's in your garden?" Around the time the theme was announced I first saw the Hoffman "Dream Big" panels, and had the idea of using the panel for my challenge. In early March I bought the "Opal" colour:

I thought the panel needed a little something to properly represent my garden, so I purchased from Spoonflower a piece of fabric featuring large bees.

When I buy plants for the garden, one of my considerations is whether they will provide food for our bees. For example, all my dahlias are open-centred, not the pom-pom type that the panel appears to be. So I planned to quilt the centre to look more like an open-centred dahlia that bees love.


Last month I fused the bees to the panel, did a bit of free-motion embroidery on them, then started the quilting.

17th November:

On the 19th November, I had lunch with a couple of quilting friends, and while they admired my quilting so far, they pointed out that the bees' eyes were a problem. Jenni pinned a piece of black chiffon over one of them, and it was instantly improved:

Blurry photo without the flash, but you can see that the dark eye is much better. Jenni gave me a couple of pieces of chiffon so that I could fix the eyes.

I continued with the quilting. By the 29th November, I was reaching the edges of the panel:

I changed threads as I quilted from the centre to the edges:

The quilting was completed on the 2nd of December:

Photo outside in the evening, making the colours look a bit cooler.

But the white eyes were still there, waiting to be fixed. I used a technique learnt in the Christine Lethlean workshop in August. I covered the whole area with the chiffon, stitched it in place, then cut away the excess.

Eyes fixed, batting and backing trimmed:

Flash photo inside.

Measuring the quilt top, I discovered it was 100cm from top to bottom, but 106cm from side to side. It looked a bit odd; not square, but not rectangular enough to look like a rectangle. It was meant to be square when purchased, so I don't know if it shrank with pre-washing, or if the quilting pulled it in more in one direction than the other. I eventually decided to trim 6cms from the width to make the quilt square.

That was a bit painful!

Hand sewing the back of the binding on 4th December:

And today, after completing the binding, here is the finished quilt:

 And here it is flapping in the breeze in the sun, so you can see more of the texture:

Tonight was the challenge reveal.

I did not win the prize.