Posted on by Pam

Lone(ly) Rainbow - Finished!

Whew. This is the last of the backlogged, need-to-be-photographed finished quilts! And it’s a doozy.
It’s not particularly large, measuring 60×60″ or so, but the quilting was intimidating enough that I stalled and waffled on it for a while.

The color scheme came about from a jelly roll of solids and a serious love of rainbows harkening back to my childhood. I was tempted to add some Lisa Frank-esque elements to really emphasize it, but thinking about Lisa Frank made think of stickers and stationery in middle school, and middle school made me think of mean girls, and the mean girls made me think of lighting things on fire with the burning hatred of a 1,000 suns.

It could be that this took so long to quilt because I still have some unresolved issues related to mean girls in middle school. To be entirely truthful, alternate names I considered for this quilt were “Out of the Ashes” and “Where There’s Fire, There’s Hate Notes In My Locker”.

ANYWHO, quilting is literally therapy and all that, so here’s what I ultimately did.  Keeping the fire in mind, I went with some feathery flames in the blades themselves; the middle got pink threat, and the outer ring got an aqua thread.

I wanted to keep with the flame theme, and actually considered something “icy” to go with the fire, but ultimately when with a smokier texture.  In retrospect, I’d like to have found a “wispier” smoke than a cartoony smoke, but it is it what it is. And more importantly, it’s done!

I did want to have the smoke look like it’s just furling out from the flames and onto the background, so I used a straight-line texture to look like a background for the smoke to be on top of.

I did start marking all the lines to quilt, but ended up using 1″ wide painters’ tape to finish out the marking.

I need to block the quilt still so it lies flat, and although I have some reservations about how I finished it, I’m happy to think this quilt was good preparation for my next quilt!

 

18 Replies to “Lone(ly) Rainbow - Finished!”

  1. You did an amazing job on this one, and I just love how you quilted it. Mean middle school girls be damned!

    1. I love it and I’m pretty glad you didn’t let your inner Lisa Frank rule. LOVE the quilting and I think mean girls in middle school are a rite of passage or something. Great post and quilt!

  4. Beautifully done! Great quilting designs. No hate notes in your locker from me. I’m sticking a puffy rainbow sticker on the door instead.

  10. A-ma-zing!! I super love this! And I love your quilt story. You are awesome. Let me say it again. YOU ARE AWESOME. The quilting is awesome. Please eat a peanut butter cup in celebration of your awesomeness.

  11. All the flames and smoke look amazing, and not something I’m quite confident enough to tackle myself so all kudos to you on that, but I just adore the straight line quilting in the background. That’s so clever and lifts the rest of the quilting, making it look even more fancy.

    Also doing time zone math in my head, and I think you could be recording a podcast right now… like RIGHT NOW… maybe…

  13. Beautiful quilting on a beautiful quilt! How did you do the swirls? Did you mark it before you started stitching or just have at it?

  15. Very pretty! I love the quilting! Warning on the feelings stuff…i have found that it’s gotten worse since my kids have entered high school. I actually have felt ill when I’ve had to be in the building during lunch (the office is next to the lunch area). It makes wonder why people would EVER want to work there. They must have had completely different experiences than I did!

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