The BIG Hawaiian is DONE

93" x 94". Cecelia, an experienced quilter, pieced this quilt. This is the fourth or fifth of these quilts that I have done from a local quilt class given at the Ramona Senior Center about 3 years ago.

The pattern is wonky so the medallion always has some fullness. The blocks were a snap to quilt and fun to design the elements for them. The intersections were a bit tricky so I went slowing into those. But my hopping foot still got stuck so I would hit the STOP button and use my had to wiggle the foot out of the intersection. This meant, of course, that the first stich out of hte corner is a l-o-n-g stitch but those spots were not noticable.

My previous post detailed my plan to use Hobbs 80-20 and QD Puff for faux trapunto under the medallion. The QD Puff coupled with a lot of Rebecca Segura's 3s and Es bacgkround fill pounded down the excess fabric. There were two stragetic tucks in there. I was disappointed because I wanted to use some motifs (hibiscus) in those big light blue spots. It would have been fun to fill up that space with some artistic quilting. I'm not saying that the 3s and Es are not artistic, I just prefer to have "less" background fill in a quilt. I don't like the difference in the density from the rest of the quilt either and if I didn't know that it was damage control background fill, I would just think that the quilt lacked either imagination or the proper tools to fill those areas with something different. Everybody that has seen it has been wow'd by it. People love those 3s and Es. The rep from Immaculate Heart of Mary picked up the quilt yesterday and was very happy with it. I asked that she let me know how much the quilt makes at their raffle. I'll post an update after their spring even coming up later this month.

Well, here are the photos. The first two photos show the issues with fullness that I had with this quilt. The 2 batts, faux trapunto and background fill took care of those issues. The setting and side triangles all have freehand feathers but they really blended in so much they were invisible. I used some Isacord silver thread to outline parts of the feathers just to draw the eye to those sections of the quilt.











The fabric has some stars and some bubbles. So I quilted some pebbles in the center of the medallion. (the pebbles are homage to Adam, th Prince of Pebbles over on MQR).