Jewel Box Quilt

I am so excited to have finished my Jewel box quilt and be able to share pictures with you.  The blocks in this quilt were my President Blocks made by our guild members and given to me when my turn as guild president was over. So this quilt is very special to me and I will be using it on my bed!!

I had shown this as a quilt top here last month and was unhappy with my choice in border fabrics. So I found a dark brown and blue batik in my stash and had JUST enough to make it work.   I’m must happier with this chose of fabric and glad I cut the blue one off.  Yes I just cut off the seam allowance instead of ripping. It made the medium blue inner border smaller but that was okay, it was too big anyway!  :)

I wanted to custom quilt this one but not go crazy with it as I like light custom on my quilts, that just my personal taste.

I used a few different color threads.  Brown So Fine in the outer border and dark batiks in the body of the quilt.  Matched blues in the two inner borders and used off white in the background.   Light beige  Bottom Line for the back to give a whole-cloth look.  I was really surprised how great the back turned out, I might even use it this way too!  The backing fabric is extra wide Stonehenge.

I CC’d the dark batik squares and then added another curve along both side in the background to create the pumpkin seed design you see on the back.  I debated about added another curve to those little background triangles and even stitched a few out but knew right away that was the wrong way to go. It took away from the straight lines framing the larger Quarter Square Triangles.   I’m glad I tried those or I would still be wondering.

It then took me awhile to decide on what to do in the empty frames around the QST’s that I created with the single row of quilting to divide up the background.  I had done small loops in the middle border already so tried more of those and really liked how they looks.  Making these decisions can drive me crazy sometime…but in a good way as it make me think!   :)

Did my favourite Echo Curved border, you can find my tutorial on that design here.

I swept the ice off to get a few pictures….love this one with the cracks!  I named that crack ‘The Diamond” as it sparkles and is huge!  A girl can dream can’t she  :)

One last picture….now to get working on the binding.  I dyed some brown fabric this morning to use for binding so I better get cracking on it so I can bring it to guild next week for Show and Tell.