Dinos Nearly Done!

I smashed out the quilting for my dinosaur quilt over two days, which is probably quite slow for many others out there, but for me is pretty good considering just how much quilting went into it. I had lots of fun teaching myself a vine and leaf meander which I love! It was rather time consuming, but oh so worth it and easier than I first suspected.

I wanted to do a different all-over design for the sky as I didn't think green vines and leaves would look so good over my blue sky. I also wanted to add a bit of interest and a slight stormy sort of nature to tie in with the erupting volcano. And so I went with waves across the sky with some fun swirls thrown in for good measure, another first for me! I was a little worried that waves and swirls might make it look more like water than sky, and while I think this design would be perfect for a water scene, I feel it worked well here also. I could do with a little more practice with this design, but on the whole I am very happy with how it turned out.

And finally I think my favourite bit of quilting might be the border, although it is hard to pick between this and the leaves. This is another design that I taught myself for this quilt.

I really hard a time trying to decide how to quilt this whole quilt and so I made myself up some practice sandwiches and started doodling. In my doodles I tried some feathers which weren't nearly as nice as I'd like, so I thought I'd switch it up a bit and have swirls coming out of the stem instead of feather plumes and I loved it. I then went straight to my quilt border from my doodling and was so focused on making my quilting as neat as possible that I forgot to change my thread colour! I had bought a dark pinky-purply thread the same colour as the border so that my mistakes would be some what camouflaged. However I love the way the blue just pops out of the purple and am so glad I made that mistake!

All that's left to do now is the binding. I'm going to make and machine sew the binding on to the front today, ready to take to work and hand sew it to the back tonight and tomorrow night when things are quiet and I have not much to do. I'll show a picture of the whole quilt once the binding is on so stay tuned.

Happy quilting!