IQA Silent Auction Quilt Finished

Hi all -

I'm happy to say that I just finished my IQA silent auction quilt, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. In my previous post, I showed you how I quilted the seahorse image that I found in one of my copyright-free Dover books. When the seahorse was finished, it was time to work on the background quilting. I started by drawing a box around the image approximately where I would like to add borders:

This box showed me where to stop my background quilting. To help the seahorse stand out a little and to give me a line for travel stitching, I started with a narrow echo line all the way around the seahorse:

Then I drew a line representing the ground and quilted pebbles. Intermixed in the pebbles are larger pebbles with a little curl inside that I added because I like the look, but realized while I was quilting them that they looked like snails. Perfect!

Then I drew lines where I wanted to quilt seaweed and added that quilting:

Finally, I filled in behind with a water design:

With the background quilting complete, I could start adding the borders. I wanted to wait to add the borders because I didn't want the dense quilting in the middle to distort the borders and I wanted to make sure that I liked the amount of space I was leaving around the seahorse. I added the borders using the sew-and-flip method. I chose the fabrics and widths improvisationally. As each strip was added, I quilted it with a specialty stitch from my sewing machine. This quilting was done with the same thread that was used for the seahorse so that I could tie in different browns to the center color. Here's how the borders turned out:

As I was adding the borders, I looked back at the guidelines and realized that my piece had already reached the 25" limit so I couldn't add any more borders on the top or bottom. I think it would have looked a little bit better with slightly wider top/bottom borders, but I'm still happy with how it turned out. Here it is trimmed up with the binding added:

And here's the back:

I love it when you can see the quilted image on the back! And here are pictures of the corners so you can see the fabric and specialty stitches used:

I got the hanging sleeve and label finished tonight, so I can get this shipped off this week. I'm glad to have this done so I can get back to some of my other projects!

Hope all is going well for you!

Nancy