Turtle Time

This is the 30th quilt commissioned by my friend Mari, and the first one for this family. 

The original idea was for something "beachy" with surfboards, because the family recently moved from Hawaii to Tampa.

After some further discussion, it morphed to "palm trees with whales or turtles".  I looked at a number of patterns, but couldn't find anything that worked. We went back and forth and then the parents actually found a pattern they liked and forwarded it to me! That rarely happens.

It had water and sand and turtles! Perfect!

The main pattern is made from 72 blocks (8 across by 9 down). Each block begins with a 6" square. Then, I used a quarter-circle template to cut each into 2 parts. By then arranging the quarter-circle part with the other "half" from another color, and sewing them together along the curved edge, I ended up with 4.5" two-toned blocks (plus the full-sized sand block in the bottom left). I used a number of batik colors to shade the waves across from deep water to shallow water to seaweed-water to sand.

Then the turtles. The pattern provided a template, which was the big turtle. I thought that making all the turtles this size would take up too much room, and also that having a variety of sizes would add more interest. So the middle 3 were scaled to 90%, and the little guy was at 85%. This also gave me the opportunity to use different fabrics to represent their life cycle. In this world, their shells, head and appendages get darker as they age and grow.

Each turtle is actually made of 6 pieces: the head, the body, and the 4 legs. The fabric was put on double-sided fusible webbing. Once the quilt top was complete, I arranged them as shown and fused them in place. But since this quilt will be used (a dragger instead of a hanger), and most certainly washed, I thought that they might start to fray and come off over time. So, I whipstitched them in place using a single strand of thread (each turtle took about an hour to do!).  If you zoom in on the above photo you can see this stitching.

Then the top was framed by more blue batiks, reinforcing the feeling of water.

For the back, I found a fabric with colorful turtles (perhaps a different species!).

 

You can see from this photo that the quilting is a simple ditch pattern. I followed each undulation with a matching color thread, switching colors at each curve. Thus, as usual, it is basically invisible on the front side.

Have fun at the beach, Miles!