Celebrate with Cake!

Our guild's quilt show was this past weekend, full of our members beautiful quilts, plus challenge quilts from those who desired to participate. Introducing 'Celebrate with Cake!', my creation for the guild's 
'How Do You Celebrate' challenge. 

Remember this fabric I wasn't too fond of?

Our little packages included not only these two challenging fabrics, but also the following rules: 
no larger than 24" x 24"
75% of the front is from the two fabrics
any additional fabrics ok, except white, black, or grey. 
Hmmm.

Celebrations - birthday's, weddings, baby showers, holidays, heck, even family BBQ's always involve cake. And having taken up cake decorating as a teenager, no occasion for a decorated cake passed me by. 

Thinking cake, then seeing the fabric, I was immediately struck by the tent roofs, and how one would make a perfect cake stand base. And lucky for me, one of those tent roofs was close enough to the center of the fabric along the bottom, making it the perfect spot to start building my cake.

With the addition of a few fused fabric scraps, ric rac, gold and silver lame, plus other trims, my tiered cake came together.

Now for the quilting, which plays a big part in making this cake look real. I wanted this cake to puff up from the background, which meant trapunto work plus all of the quilting details on just the cake.

With the details done, the extra batting got trimmed away,

and the whole top put on another piece of batting. Now to deal with that background!

Quilting in earnest, I went for a dense, echoed triangle fill, to mute that background. Notice the dark maroon areas are even more densely quilted. The viewer gets to still feel the celebration with the circus tent background, without it overwhelming the cake. 

Check out how the cake puffs up away from the background - one could almost cut into it! And what cake isn't complete without roses? I found the perfect rose buttons - they look just like I would make them out of icing!

Celebrate with Cake! looks like a delicious treat to me and another great challenge quilt to add to my collection!

I wish that I had pictures of the other entries to show - we have a lot of creative quilters in our guild. But, unfortunately, I could not attend due to an early birthday celebration for hubby - and yes, we had cake! And even if I did have pictures, I don't have permission from the creators to post them online. So, let's have cake instead!

Have a great day quilting!