Holy sheezy! And Ruffled Roses (lots of pictures)

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Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang, y'all!  I am so in awe of all of the comments and emails related to yesterday's post.  And my attention was brought once again to the fact that my head is up my own skirt in my header photo.  :)

I finally got replies sent out to all of you that commented and emailed. At least all of you that I could. There were a couple of no-replies and one even bounced back.

Seriously, thank you all for sharing your stories, experiences, and thoughts on a topic that sits pretty deep with me.  I was laughing and crying with all of you.  So thank you!

But I thought I would lighten the mood a little today with a feakin' uh-may-zing quilt I recently finished for a client.  Sound like fun?  Let's do it.

Lynn friended me on Facebook quite a while ago.  I never really heard from her, until one day she sent me a message that she had been face-stalking my quilting photos and wanted to send me a top.  She said that it was bright colors, and that I could do anything I wanted to it.  Um, hello?  Speakin' my language!
She sent me the top and I did a little happy dance when I took it out of the box.  Probably the most perfectly pieced top I have ever quilted.  It is last year's block of the month for TheQuiltShow, called Ruffled Roses.  Now since I had a pretty big part in the samples for their block of the month for this year, I have seen several versions of the Ruffled Roses quilt.  But I did not recognize Lynn's quilt as Ruffled Roses.  It doesn't even look like the same quilt.  Her fabric selections are perfect and amazing and awesome and suh-weet!!!

See my slippers on the floor?  Have I mentioned I've only worn shoes once in nearly two months?  Anycrap!  See how awesome this quilt is?  See how much work she put into it?  She even pressed all of her seams open!  I was in heaven.  It's no coincidence that I had all the thread colors I would need to quilt it. 
I'm going to try to not talk too much about it.  I'm just going to let the pictures speak for themselves.  This sucker took me nearly two weeks to quilt.  I'm 100% not joking.  I could still do more to it, but I think it's pretty perfect just as it is.  If I ever get to quilt another of these, I already  know some other things I want to try!

All of the white thread stitching in the ditch was done, and I had moved onto curved cross-hatching with framing feathers in the inside of the outer border.

Then I did some feathers in the 1" square-on-point border, and feathers in the white triangle sections of the basket blocks.  I ended up stippling the rest of the background fabric sections of the baskets.  I try to stay away from stippling, but at this point I realized just how long this quilt was going to take, I had no idea how much money she wanted to spend on the quilting, and decided that it would be best to make some sacrifices here and there.

The I did feathers in the yellow and orange triangles around the basket blocks.  My absolute favorite part!

More feathers in the lattice...  Feathers, feathers, feathers!  In that white appliqued border, I really wanted to do what is becoming my trademark:  the triple stitch.  But do you know how long that would've taken?  Do you know what the chances were of me royally screwing it up, having to get it lined up just perfectly on both sides of the applique?  I wasn't going to risk it, so I decided to McLisa (McTavish) it instead.

Now, since I didn't do the triple stitch in the applique border, I decided to do the unexpected.  Those setting triangles around the center medallion?  I really thought about putting some curved frames around them and then triple stitching to the seams, filling the rest of the area with a feather motif.  But I decided not to.  That would be the thing a lot of people would probably do.  So I just triple stitched the whole thing and I love the look of it!

Then I pebbled the purple applique border, pebbled the orange applique corners (with some funky curved frames to the outside), did some funky figure 8-ish thingy in the purple solid border and some spirals in the two skinny teal borders.  All that was left was the multi-colored section of the outside border.  I thought on it the entire time I was quilting this beauty, trying to decide what to do with that part of the quilt.  Could not come up with any sort of motif work that would look good in any single thread, with that many colors.  So, I did something that I think turned out pretty cool.  It's sort of a faux triple stitch, in that I stitched down the ditch, and a line on each side of the ditch.  I have to say, having the ditch there to keep the lines even made it so much easier! And I love the lime green thread.

Last step complete!  Almost.  I still have to put it back on the frame one more time, so that I can stitch in the ditch in the little itty bitty rectangle border toward the center.  Since it's being done in purple I kind of forgot to do that step.  But here are a bunch of pictures of this quilt in all its gorgeousness, off the frame.  <3 !!

 

To say that I love it would be, um, quite the understatement!