How my second orange quilt became my first...

Orange Twirl won't set records for my fastest finish for a quilt, but it's setting records for how happy it makes me. 

 

 

 

 

I'm loving all those delicious orange fabrics, which comes as a surprise - until a year ago, I honestly had next to no orange fabrics in my stash (I'm more into blues, reds or pinks).  Then, I found out that orange is my hubby's favourite colour (oh, the things you can discover after 20+ years of marriage! lol) and I decided I NEEDED to make him his own quilt.  In his favourite colour.  A quilt that would be a gift for him and a colour challenge for me (...however, this isn't the one for him...progress on his is being made ;o).  So began my quest to collect some orange fabrics. 

 Here are the first fabrics I gathered for his quilt....

 

 

 

Now, Orange Twirl was started  as a way to use up the leftovers from making the blocks for my hubby's quilt ... and well, I got so carried away with this design, I needed more orange fabrics to make a bigger quilt.  Funny, how that happens. ;o)   My orange fabric quest wasn't over! I stalked fabric sales online and in real time, looking for more orange fabrics and on and off I added more blocks over the course of the year. 

 

 

 

 January 2013  I added this quilt-in-progress to my Finish-A-Long list.  After mentioning in a post that I still found myself needing more orange fabrics, so I could make a twin-sized quilt, several lovely blog friends stepped up with offers to send me some orange fabrics from their own stashes. 

 

Without their help my finished quilt wouldn't be this lovely.  Many thanks to Nicolette, Wendy, Carol and to Maria.  My finished quilt comes with a global spin of friendship -beautiful orange fabrics came from the Netherlands, England, USA and Sweden, making this Canadian girl's heart swell with emotion.

 

Without further ado, here is my finished quilt!

 

Orange Twirl Quilt!

I wrote previously that I was going to rip out my free motion quilting - I was stuck on the fact that all those swirls disappeared on the printed fabric.  After taking a step back from the quilting (without breaking out the seam ripper first), I decided that the fabric was the real feature of this quilt and to not sweat the quilting.  I think I just had the memory of using this same quilting design on a solids only project and how the quilting just "popped".  Realizing that unless I chose a contrasting thread to quilt with, the quilting would only show on the solids in this quilt and disappear otherwise, meant I could see it for what it was - a fun FMQ design that adds lots of texture and I was fine with that.

 

For the backing, I decided to go with a stripe that has orange and the other touches of colour found amongst the variety of fabrics used in the quilt top.  It's bright, happy and playful, while allowing a better look at the quilting.

A dotted binding comes as no surprise, right?  ;o)

Seriously, choosing a binding fabric was the toughest part - I auditioned about a dozen options, but in the end went with Robert Kaufman's Spot On (I love this happy dot fabric!).  There's one corner of the quilt where you can see that the binding and block are the same fabric, which I usually try to avoid doing, but since I love dots, I ignored my usual rule.  ;o) 

 

 

Now that this quilt is crossed off my FAL list, I can make some headway on the other quilts still languishing as WIPs (such as the one I started for my hubby ...which was supposed to be my first orange quilt ;o).

 

I'm linking up with Amanda Jean's

Finish-It-Up Friday!