Rainbow X Quilt

I made this quilt about a year ago, but I sent it away without taking proper pictures.  It was for my oldest niece, and each of my four sisters contributed embroideries so that my niece could have something made for her by all of her aunts.   It even has one square (shown at the bottom of the post) embroidered by me in honor of her two grandmas. 

When I vacationed at my sister's house last week at my sister's house, I snatched the opportunity to dragged it off of my niece's bed and outside for pictures.  BTW, I'm SO jealous of my sister's 1.5 story deck and wind-less weather conditions.  I got to take pictures of a twin size quilt by just dropping it over the deck railing, having my nieces stand on the deck and hold it up, and then walking downstairs and standing in front of it.  So easy. 

The good camera would have been nice... but the point & shoot fit in our luggage.

The whole quilt (including border) is strip pieced, but I used various tricks of rotating, arranging, and offsetting so that it mostly looks random.  It helps that there are a lot of different fabrics in the quilt... I used the entire line of Fresh by Deb Strain for Moda. 

I did diagonal straight line quilting over the whole top.  I was using a tiny $90 Brother sewing machine at the time, and I needed something as manageable as possible.  I was very nervous about machine quilting over my embroidery.   I looked all around online, but nobody had anything to say about tricks or pitfalls.  I may or may not have semi-screamed a panicked "ah-eeeeeeee" the first three or four or ten times I quilted over an embroidery square, but there was never any problem, and by the end it was old hat.  I thought that the embroidery designs would be interrupted by the quilting, but that didn't really happen:

Butterfly embroidery closeup - image by Adrianne Ove (Little Bluebell)

This was the first bed-size quilt that I have made on my own, the only bed size that I have finished so far, and I think it's my favorite of the quilts that I've done.  I just love how cheerful it is, and the meaning behind all of the contributed embroidery squares.