A Birthday Quilt for Kate's Mom!

Hello everyone, well I've been a bit incommunicado, and here's why, drum roll please......  I had my first commissioned quilt to complete!!!! YEAH!! So it was an intensive one month project (unfortunately that was all the time I had to complete it). My mom's co-worker, Kate, wanted a very sweet home made quilt to give to her mom for her birthday, and who did she chose for this very special project....ME! So, of course, I chronicled my journey through pictures, did you expect anything less?

So here's the rub, since it was my first time doing this, I didn't put any restrictions on Kate. I will know better for next time, heh heh heh.  With only a month to complete I should have limited the pattern choices, but the good news is that I had the opportunity to try several new techniques. So I've included some pictures of how I put the quilt together as well as the final product pictures.

The pattern I used is from "Blocks to Diamonds: Kaleidoscope Star Quilts from Traditional Blocks" by Cheryl Malkowski, Kate chose the Desert Flower pattern.  I used a variation of her pinning technique, and here's what I did:

So the first step was making the small diamonds for the inner star, which involved lots and lots of paper piecing...several mistakes were made and several seams ripped, but here they all are.

The next step is to sew your nine diamonds into 3 strips, and this is how I pinned them to get somewhat clean points.

Insert pin through corner on top diamond.

Make sure pin goes through the corner on the bottom diamond.

Making sure that your corner pins stay straight, pin through both small diamonds as often as you would like. This will hopefully ensure that your diamonds will line up like they should.

And voila! you have two diamonds attached.

I repeated this process to attach all the diamonds together.

Three strips of diamonds.

To get the strips of diamonds attached to one another I put four pins in to make sure my points lined up, one at each corner, before pinning my strips of diamonds together.

One completed diamond!

The center of the quilt!

Getting all of the paper piecing done and getting the diamonds to match up was the hardest part of this quilt.  I applied my pinning technique to the rest of the quilt, but I had to make the quarter inch lines on all of my pieces.  Like below, I marked out my lines to help with my Y-seams. The book was very helpful with instructions on how to complete these pesky Y-seams. 

Square marked with quarter inch lines.

The first Y-seam is complete!

Diamonds and squares! The center of the quilt is complete!

The next set of diamonds I completed in the same was as previously discussed. Again it was 9 smaller diamonds to make one bigger diamond, and then they were joined together with, surprise surpirse, Y-seams!

And finally a single seam to add on the triangles and make it into a finished quilt top square!

In the book, the quilting was done in a couple of different colors, Kate really liked this effect so I tried to duplicate it for her, using a blue to accent the corner flowers.  I was really happy with the way it turned out!

The first round in just grey.

Accented with blue!

Here's a pretty close-up of the center of the quilt, I did a blue and grey flower in the center here too.

Kate wanted a special message for her mom's birthday.

The entire completed quilt!

I am really happy with the way it all turned out.  I think the colors Kate chose go very well together and I love the pop of the hot pink. When it was all bound and finished I wished that I had some more time so that I didn't feel as rushed, but I think it would have turned out the same way. I learned a lot about paper piecing, sewing diamonds, and Y-seams.  I'm glad I gave Kate free reign when choosing the pattern, but I'll make sure that I only provide appropriate patterns for the time constraints the client gives me. It's beautiful and I really hope Kate's mom enjoys it. And here's where I do my imitation of Kermit....YEAH!!!!! It's done!