Blogger's Quilt Festival

I love looking through the entries for the Blogger's Quilt Festival - so much talent and so many different creative styles.  I think it can leave you a bit awestruck but in the spirit of what-the-hell I am entering my Beach Finds quilt in the Mini Quilt category.

This quilt was made for the Holiday Memories competition at Celtic Thistle Stitches.   I am fascinated by the patterns, shapes and textures of pebbles and had been collecting them on the beach with my nephew on a family trip to the Isle of Bute.

Since I love them (and my nephew) so much I decided to use some leftovers from a bed size pebbly quilt I'm making and make a smaller quilt as a reminder.  This quilt makes me happy because it is a very personal quilt.

It is made using three shades of Oakshott cotton.  The grainy sheeniness of the shot cottons is perfect for the texture of the pebbles which are all pieced - the one with a ring on it uses reverse applique. They are machine appliqued to a white Klona cotton background.  The binding is scrappy and the whole thing was pebble quilted (what else:-) except for some wavy quilting which washes from one side of the quilt to the other, like trickles of water across a beach.  Where the wavy quilting runs across I left the binding white so that the quilting seems to flow over and off the quilt.

I also threw in a tiny clam shell for fun and for practice at FMQ which I am not very experienced at.

This is the first time I used a proper FMQ foot, but I quickly got addicted and have been playing with it ever since.

Apologies to those who have seen this quilt quite recently, and many thanks if you have dropped over from the Festival to have a look!   Hello:-)!

Thank you very much to Amy for the massive amount of work that the Quilt Festival must involve.