Emerald - Blogger's Quilt Festival

If you are visiting from the Blogger's Quilt Festival welcome to my blog!    If you're already a reader, apologies as you might have seen too much quite a lot of this quilt already.    Anyway, here is Emerald which I am entering in the Wall Hanging category.

I am still a quilting novice and feeling my way style-wise but I was really happy when I finished this one because it is very me!  Emerald was originally made for the Pantone Colour Challenge using five shades of green Oakshott cottons, and sand linen (maker unknown).   I wanted to use the different colours of shot cotton and the way that they reflect the light depending on how you work with the grain of the fabric to suggest the cut facets of an emerald in a claw setting.

If I tell you the central square on point in this WIP shot is made from one fabric you can maybe see how the way you orientate the fabric changes the tone, and you can also see the effect where two very slightly different shades are used side by side.

Picking threads

Although I wanted to suggest the shininess of the emerald with the shot cottons I wanted the rest of the quilt to be quite quiet, so I used linen round for contrast and to represent the rough stone where the uncut emerald came from and bound it in the same linen with scraps of the Oakshott.  

To add to the rough texture of the linen I hand quilted this part, but machine quilted the emerald block using matching threads a quarter inch inside the seams.

Then I had to take lots of photographs of it in different places:-)

This is my favourite picture, in the snow.

Quilt details:

: entered in the Wall Hanging category
: approximately 26 inches square
: made using Oakshott cotton and linen
: hand quilted using a matching thread in the linen
: machine quilted, again using matching threads inside the seams of the Oakshott triangles
: bound with linen and scraps of Oakshott

Thank you very much to Amy, for all the work involved in organising the BQF.  It's inspirational looking through all the entries so I'm just off there now.