Pin and Earring Quilt

Recently, I wrote about all the dragonfly decor around my home. There's also quite a bit of dragonfly jewelry in my life, too. Rather than have it hidden away, I thought it would be fun to make a quilt to display it.

There's also this pretty fabric that was gifted to me by a friend who brought it back from a trip to India a few years ago. Brightly colored, beautiful fabric from India paired with sparkly dragonfly jewelry seems like a good combination.

Light background or dark background? After auditioning several options, I settled on a dark, chocolate brown solid. It's an older piece from my stash, most likely a Robert Kaufman Kona, but I'm not positive about that.

The India fabric consists of eleven, 6 1/2"-ish squares, so I needed a design that would make the most of it. A one-inch diagonal strip on each block did the trick.

The squares were cut into four 1 1/2" strips, with a little leftover, and the background was cut into 5" squares. I didn't have a specific block size in mind, but wanted to go as big as possible. After cutting the background squares in half and sewing them on each side of a strip, I was able to square it up to 4 5/8".

Once all the blocks were made, it was time to play with the layout.

 

I got a little carried away with this part, 

but it was lots of fun.

I had to ask Erica to help with the arrangement, just to get myself back under control.

She captured the essence of the original design perfectly.

Thank you, Erica. Quilting is next. I wanted the center of each square to remain unquilted so that it would stand out more and be more amenable to having pins attached. 

I decided to quilt circles around the edge of each square.

The circles remind me of  a string of beads surrounding each center.

Then there is the larger space at the bottom. It needed some filler. I chose a design from Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Project. I chose the design Pebble Paisley to fill in that area. A simple curvy loop takes care of the small outer border. I didn't have a dark brown thread on hand for the quilting so I used Aurifil 50wt cotton in black. It worked just fine. I like that the quilting recedes on the front and simply adds texture.

The back is another matter.

There are no secrets on the back. Every wobble and jerk can be seen. It's okay, though. The wall will never give away my secrets once the quilt is hung.

Time to add the pins and earrings!

There was a happy surprise as I was pinning everything on. I thought I was going to have to rig up something for the earrings, but I accidentally let one of the earrings slip into a seam. Aha!

The seam worked perfectly. Nothing extra needed.

It makes me so happy to have found a way to show off my collection of dragonfly jewelry AND use some very special fabric.