Somewhere Over The Rainbow

This is a quilt I'm calling 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow.'

It was made in response to our guild's annual Challenge Show. This year's theme is

Rhapsody in Hue

and I immediately thought of using all the primary and secondary colors on the color wheel. I used Kona cottons for this quilt. It took quite a bit of drawing on graph paper to get it just how I wanted it. But as you can see, it's very simply made by sewing together many, many strips.

And I wanted it to be quite big. As you can see, MisterStitches is stretched as high as he can be, and it still puddles on the floor a little bit.

I want to show you some close-ups of the awesome quilting. Wonderful SisterStitches quilted it for me on her long-arm machine. I have a bit of trouble sometimes with tendonitis. And with the large size of this quilt, I just couldn't see myself pushing and pulling it through my regular-size machine.

Isn't she a great sister!?!?!? She did a really awesome job. The photo above shows a good example. In all the white areas she did an overall swirly pattern in white thread. She did different styles of quilting on different color strips. And I asked her to choose thread that is on the opposite side of the color wheel for the color blocks.

Green thread on red fabric, blue thread on orange fabric, etc.

By the way, SisterStitches does custom quilting for people, even people who live halfway across the country as I do! If you're interested, check out her blog Frayed Edge, and contact her that way.

Above you see an example of a yellow strip which has purple thread on it.

Here is the back of the quilt. I knew I would need to have a seam down the back, so I took some leftover fabric and made a strip of rainbow color to insert at the seam. I intentionally wanted the color strip to be off-center, because I thought it would be nearly impossible to get it centered exactly! The color shading you're seeing on the back of the quilt is just the colored bobbin thread used on the back of the colored blocks.

The challenge opens tonight (April 1st--no fooling!) and runs throughout the month at Gualala Arts Center in Gualala, California. If you're anywhere in the vicinity, try to check out the show.

The women in charge of the challenge this year asked that more of us make quilts, so we can have at least 50 quilts. Gualala Arts Center is 50 years old this year, so they 50 quilts would be appropriate. I'd guess that our challenge quilts usually number around 35-40. Final count of the quilts this year is somewhere around 85, so we really outdid ourselves!