One Down, One to Go!

The heat wave has abated somewhat, allowing for some quilting. Yeah!!  Maybe this quilt should have a more heat related name, but for now it's Nickel 1.

Unfortunately, that nickel bin didn't diminish at all, yet this quilt still used 192 nickel squares!  

Now for the quilting. This is a rather busy quilt, but I didn't want to slap a pantograph design on it. I wanted a challenge! 

I liked the blue in this quilt, and wanted to bring it forward and push the yellow back.  So how to do that?  Well, I kept reminding myself that the way to make the design 'pop' is to quilt densely around it.  But I had some reservations.  Mainly, I didn't want to spend umpteen hours quilting this quilt because a) it's difficult to see detailed quilting designs on such busy prints, b) I'm not overly fond of it, and c) I'm probably going to donate it.  Trying to mesh all of these factors was more the challenge than figuring out the quilting design!

Here's the final quilting choice:

Stitched in the ditch around most of the blue, then a line a 1/4" in.  Small blue squares just have arcs.

Large yellow areas are filled with a medium stipple.

And small yellow squares are filled with back and forth lines  and arcs to add interest, since filling all the yellow with stippling would have been boring.

Here's the back:

It's hard to see in this picture, but the straight line quilting is in blue, and the stippling in gold, the same as on the front.

Nickel 2 is up next.  I like this quilt a lot more than the other, so this one might get a bit more quilting.  We'll see!

 Gone quilting!