Blogger's Quilt Festival: Mon Amie

My Mon Amie quilt is the second entry for the spring Bloggers Quilt Festival hosted by Amy's Creative Side.

I created this quilt for a friend who asked for "some kind of an owl quilt." I brought in a stack of my "modern" quilt magazines with a few post-it notes here and there and let her peruse.  To my delight, she landed on a pattern that I had been wanting to try - Rangoon created by Gudrun Erla which appears in the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of Quilty Magazine.

As an added stroke of sewendipity, a few days after we started talking about our plan of attack, I saw a snippet of fabric in a quilt during a guild show and tell that was part of the Les Amis collection for Michael Miller fabrics.  It was perfect!  But in addition to the Les Amis line, some prints from the Backyard Baby line caught my eye too - and the two collections really play nicely together!  I filled out the purchased fabric with a few more from my stash and everything came together fabulous.

The rangoon blocks looked fantastic and presented a new (to me) challenge of partial seams.  I was really nervous to start with but once I got one block under my belt, it seemed like I was so worried for nothing!  The finished quilt took a little longer than I was hoping for - mostly from my own stops and starts and cramming too many projects into a few months time - but I'm so happy with how it came out.  These Amis are too cute and are definitely going to be loved and snuggled with in their new home.  

I went fairly simple with the quilting.  I used a chocolate brown thread and did a close outline of all the rangoon sticks and then went back through and filled in all the middle and border space with some chain squares.  It melts nicely into the background on the front and is still pretty subtle on the back.

 I used another Backyard Baby fabric for the binding.  The white background and multicolored cool dots worked so well for both the front and back of the quilt!

This quilt finished out at 58" x 70" - a great size for snuggling on the couch while lounging in front of the fireplace!  While you still have time, link up and check out all the other entries over at Amy's Creative Side.  Entries and nominations for Viewer's Choice ends on the 23rd and voting begins on the 24th.