Thursday 23 August 2012

I Heart Holidays!



This quilt is the ultimate homage to holidays and ice cream! Perfect combination, no? We have a favourite family holiday spot in France, and in perfectly chic french style the local icecream shop has the MOST divine artwork! On a cool coffee cream background are geometrically arranged icecream cones in the most chic of colour combinations. For two years I marvelled ( and ate icecream!), after the third year I decided it had to be a quilt! Now this was a real labour of love as it involved more than 20 carefully picked colours from the Robert Kaufman Kona Cotton range ( for those of you new to quilting Kona cottons are the ultimate when it comes to finding just the perfect shade of any colour, they offer over 200 different solid colour fabrics and you can select the colours using a super duper fold out colour chart that are most sort after by serious quilters! ( he he, I NEVER lend mine out!))There then followed a LOT of careful drafting of patterns and layouts as their artwork uses a complicated repeat so it looks like there is even more variation than there is! It was a maths challenge! I then appliqued each icecream to its 'brick' in the grid, there was an anguished sewing together marathon ( 'Please kids don't move any of them!'). I quilted around each cone and also quilted shadows of each cone in the plain section at the top of the quilt. Then on the back added my little message to my holiday paradise, check it out if you ever get the chance - oh and make sure you get an icecream while you're there!