Gypsy Diamond

 

Measures 40"square.

This was made at the start of the year with leftovers from the Gypsy Mama quilt and I finally got time to do the quilting on it during the Level Four lockdown earlier this year.

For the quilting I did different FMQ motifs in each of the strips, with a simple echoed four-petal flower in the diamond centre.

The backing is a lavender-coloured butterfly print, also from my stash. 

The quilting designs show up well on the back.

Gypsy Mama for My Mum

This is a pattern by Judi Madsen which is called 'Mama Gypsy' (I got it the wrong way around when I wrote my label, sigh) and Judi ran a quilt-along during 2019 for people to join in with, so I thought I would join in as I bought the pattern a year or two ago and this was good motivation to use it.

An inside photo  - I only got this finished on Sunday 22nd Dec, which was cutting it extremely fine
as I needed it washed, dried and wrapped up before Mum came to stay on Christmas Eve evening!

I decided to make this 81" square quilt for my mum to have on her bed as hadn't yet made a large quilt for her. She is a fan of purple, and when I found the purple/teal batik, I decided to run with those two colours and a white background - so that all took a bit of working out as the pattern is designed for using with a larger range of colours.

As mentioned in my previous post, the weather here has been terrible (not summer-like at all) and I was lucky that the 23rd of Dec was not raining and I was able to hang it up on the line for a couple of hours to help dry it out.

The photo doesn't do it justice, but every time I walked past the back door, 

the colours of the quilt looked simply stunning in the light of the overcast sky.

For the quilting, I used a range of different free motion designs - simple 1 1/2" cross-hatching inside the outer ring of batik sections, wiggly straight lines on the centre batik blocks (using a set stitch on the machine), some FMQ side to side lines inside the purple or teal borders of the small white squares, some FMQ squiggly line 'stars' inside the small white squares, straight lines inside the large solid squares, an FMQ pebbled-leaf motif inside the large white centre border and then an FMQ double-bubble style of motif in the outer white triangles. 

Phew! It was a big job on a domestic machine!

The backing is a purple minky (for which I just use flannel as the 'batting' as the quilt is massive and was heavy enough just with the minky backing).

Merry Christmas!

The great thing about Judi's pattern, is that it also gives you a smaller pattern to use up the off-cuts from making this quilt. I didn't follow that but have got two small lap quilt tops made from the off-cuts, waiting to be quilted...adding to the to-do list!

Great to be sharing with my quilting friends via Wendy's Peacock Party , Kelly's Needle and Thread Thursday and Michelle's Beauties Pageant - make sure you check out the great work everyone 

has been doing by visiting those links too!

Here is a photo of the quilt on mum's bed - a king single: