Happy Birthday Dad!!

The main reason that my blogging was quiet through much of November isn't because I wasn't doing any sewing, but because I was working on a very special gift; a birthday present for my Dad.

I found these fabrics on the internets, and after brainstorming over a design I bought some. I was very impressed by the service provided by the site; they responded overnight (for me) to my email enquiry, and once I bought the fabric it arrived MUCH quicker than I was expecting, 7 days later I had the fabric in my grubby little hands (which I washed before handling the fabric).

The piecing of the quilt top was straight forward and pretty quick to piece. I chose a design that took advantage of showing off the prints on the fabrics and adding some plain black poplin as sashing. The finished quilt is a little bit larger than my couch quilt:

I wanted to choose a quilting design that would work well with the fabrics; emphasising them rather than detracting from them. Once I decided what I wanted to do the quilting was a little tricky as the only quilting I've done on a full size quilt was straight lines, so some of it leaves a little to be desired, but overall I'm pretty proud of my efforts.

(click on the below images for bigger versions)

On the "sea of holes" I wiggled between the holes in vaguely diagonal lines:

On the orange I wiggled my way around the different characters:

On the small animation cells down the sides I went around the squares and circles. On each of the four large panels I did a slightly different thing.

On this one I went around the submarine, the circles and the outline of the Beatles, and then stippled around the bubbles in the background:

Similar to the previous one, on this panel I went around the submarine and then stippled around the bubbles:

On this panel I free-motion quilted an echo pattern around the band:

And on this one I did a similar echo pattern around the Beatles and within the hill:

I decided to leave the sashing without any quilting on it, as I wanted the emphasis to be on the Beatles fabric.

For the backing I chose this fabric:

And the binding this pale blue (still from the Beatles range):

So, Dad, I hope you like it.