My online quilt guild meets up every summer. It is one of the highlights of my year. We laugh and cry and eat and create for 5 straight days. I love every minute of it. There are about 3o of us who go and we are in our 8th year (I think). One of the activities we have is a challenge. This year we are supposed to make a black and white and red quilt. Last year we were supposed to make a quilt using the colors from a candy bar wrapper.

Of course, I don’t get a chance to piece my own stuff any longer but one of my close friends in the group, Sandy, is a phenomenal piecer. As a longarm quilter I get to see lots of piecing and a wide range of piecing abilities. Sandy is one of the best piecers I know, hands down.

Her quilt top at the retreat last year was inspired by a Pay Day candy bar wrapper. She made up a bunch of half square triangles and then randomly sewed them together. I loved the abstract nature of her final product and it was a little scary too! In fact, I gave it back to her initially because I simply couldn’t figure out what the heck to quilt on it. I pride myself in being creative but this quilt top had me stumped!

Finally I was up against the deadline for Paducah entries and I knew I just needed to force myself to come up with a plan. I took photos of the top and pulled them into Photoshop so I could doodle on them in order to audition designs. I used my vast library of inspirational photos culled over the last 4 years of internet surfing using Evernote and I came up with a plan.

Throughout this post you’ve seen photos of what I did on the top and I’m quite happy with it. I quilted it completely hand guided, free motion with Hobbs Wool batting and a second layer of Hobbs 80/20. I used Bottom Line thread, Sew Fine and a bit of Glide thread too. This quilt was accepted in the Hampton, VA show being held this weekend so if you are going first stop by the APQS booth and say hi, then go find my quilt and let me know if there are any shiny ribbons hanging on it. 🙂

We’ve entered the top in Paducah too and I’m hoping it will get it but we won’t know for a while.

What do you think? Do you like it?

You can watch a video on how to make the Berries and Banana’s filler on the APQS YouTube channel.