Four Seasons Swap - Finished

My quilt is now in the mail to Oregon and seeing as I don't think my recipient reads my blog, I thought I'd share with you photos of my finished project. As you might recall, the swap rules are pretty simple: a quilt between 16 and 20 inches square, with a "summer" theme. You can pretty much go anywhere you might like with it.

I settled on ice cream, as you probably already knew. Here's the finished view:


I'd originally wanted to do an ice cream truck and some music like Pop, Goes the Weasel!, but when I realized the actual size I'd be working in, I didn't think I had the skill to pull off something that detailed in the relatively limited amount of space. So, I went pretty basic.

I'm not sure how I feel about it; it's really my first original design effort, other than a small quilt I made for the guild's coffee cup challenge a few years ago. I was inspired by advertising for ice cream in general (do a Google image search on some particular products, like "ice cream sandwich" or "ice cream bar" and you'll see what I mean) and wanted to make it fun and bright.

Now, I don't generally do a lot of applique, so this is a bit of a departure and a challenge. I did my best - downloaded a fun font from online called Heartbreaker (I think this is the one!), used it to type out the words for the quilt at the right size, printed it out, cut the letters apart and taped them back together so I could get the desired level of "overlappingness."



I had fun quilting the cone to really look like a cone. And I sewed bugle beads on the top scoop to look like sprinkles. Not being experienced in beading, I hope that they stay on. Had a few miscues with beading needles and such, but they do seem to be well affixed. Ben helped me a bit with drawings of ice cream sandwiches and cones. Thanks a million, honey!

This was a fun challenge, but I must say I'm relieved to have it finished and in the mail. I waited to the last minute yet again, and this caused more than a bit of stress. I'll certainly be checking my own mail in the coming days to see what fun quilt I might receive. I still need to upload my images to Flickr with tags for the group, but will do so soon. You can search on the "4sqssum08" tag to find those images already there. Quite an inspiring group; very interesting to see how many directions the theme can lead.

Now it's time to get started on a major project that has a mid-September deadline.