In Full Bloom

The second quilt I carried to Denmark when I visited in 2011, was this one for my sister Vibeke. Some years ago, I had made her a throw, but for some reason it was way too small and thus not very useful, so I had promised to make her another bigger one. This quilt is actually 71" x 81" so it is more like a twin than a throw, but certainly big enough which was the point. I didn't work from a pattern and didn't design it in advance, but just put it together as I went along and stopped when I liked the way it looked, I didn't really realize how big it was until it was finished.

I started with the two big flowers and just built around them. All of the fabrics in the top - except for the two border fabrics - are from Anna Maria Horner's Garden Party line of fabrics.  As I hadn't planned ahead, I didn't have anything for the borders when I came to that step, so I went to my favorite shop, Intown Quilter, in Decatur, GA, and was fortunate to run into my favorite border person, Taffy McLaughlin who helped me pick the border fabrics.  Without her brilliance this quilt would have been much less complete.  I just love the final border fabric and think it is absolutely perfect.  But there is no way I would EVER have dreamed of pulling it off the shelf or ever imagined it would work with this quilt until Taffy put it down and I immediately saw that it was created just for this quilt.  Thank you Taffy for this and so many other borders!  And for so many other pieces of advice and everything else I have learned and continue to learn about quilting from you.



Up there is a picture of my sister holding the quilt which was expertly machine quilted to a perfect finish by my wonderful friend and Georgia's one and only professional machine quilter, Regina Carter, without whom, I would be no quilter at all.  Regina used a really fun quilting pattern called Bubbleplay, which, unfortunately, is hard to see in these pictures - sorry Regina!