This was supposed to be finished two years ago, but instead I managed to quickly finish it up on the two-year anniversary of Bogomila's home-coming from Bulgaria.
I decided to make Bobbi's quilt a full-size bed quilt instead of the throw/snuggle size that I did for the other kids who got theirs as babies. Good thing, too, since she's a legitimate eighteen-year-old adult now by the time I finished it!
The color scheme was based on her telling us she liked black and blue, and green and purple. The fabrics are a fun mix of leftovers from other projects and some that I purchased just for her.
The purple paw print has featured in every one of the kids' other quilts (well, Krassi's has a green version I found of it), and the one at the bottom is a large-scale cabbage print!! That one I bought in honor of Bobbi's love of cabbage. Again, all of this was purchased and begun before we really knew her, so I'm happy now when I've been working on it and she tells me that it's one of the prettiest quilts she's seen. She's not known for meaningless flattery, so I know she really likes it.
I was particularly excited about the black and gray background fabric. That was probably the most challenging part of the quilt - finding something that would function as a solid (which you can see it does in the photo of the whole quilt), but that would not be too boring up close, since it's such a large percentage of the quilt. The mild herringbone mimics the pattern of the pieced "feathers" while still acting as a neutral.
Quilting this one was an interesting challenge as well. I started with the background, following the linear pattern of the fabric, back and forth, back and forth, but wasn't sure what to do for the feathers. I had to sketch quite a few back options before finding a motion that was simple enough to do without having to rotate the quilt in the machine, but still was an effective enough suggestion of feathery-ness.
On the back of the quilt you can see more clearly how the two machine-quilted patterns work together:
I used my favorite low-loft cotton batting. The narrow binding was made from a conglomeration of scraps I had laying around to avoid a trip out to the fabric store!
(The inspiration for the pattern of the quilt top came from this book: Strip your Stash)
