I bought this piece about a year ago at Piecemakers in Costa Mesa, CA.

And it has been hanging up with this inspiration picture until this week, when I decided to take the plunge and quilt it.  It had a couple of holes so I knew I wanted to do pebbles in those areas to hide the holes.

I backed it with white muslin and used 2 layers of 100% cotton batting.I spray basted these layers together. Then I stitched around the linen so I could start the design in the middle.I used Superior Threads Magnifico thread #2003 on my Tiara II.

I started with the center diamond, just using 5 dots as reference points to use my curved Fine Line rulers from Accents in Design.  I then used the ruler to create the frame and then the crosshatching.  Then I did free motion feathers on the outside.

Since I wanted to hide the holes with pebbles I moved to that area. Pebbles are not my favorite, but thought they would be best in these areas.

I wanted to do more feathers but wasn’t sure where so I started outlining the embroidery pictures.  Then I did clamshells under the grass.  Although I wanted to do feathers wind seemed like the stitch to add to the scene.  And of course a couple of clouds.  Then added the feathers around the blue embroidery.

For the outer edge I started with the diagonal cross hatching.

But since the center had such dense quilting, the outer edge was more ruffly so I did an orange peel to even it out and put more stitching in the outside.  I started out doing each side of the line, bump bumping my way then back down the other side.   So I was doing alot of starts and stops.  It got a little tiring on the long lines.  So I tried the serpentine way, weaving back and forth over the line and then going back doing it the opposite sides.  And it was so much easier and faster.

And here is is quilted, bound and blocked.

Not perfect, and not how I envisioned it turning out, but I love it and can’t wait to do my next one.