Solar Flares revealed!

I am so happy to share this project with you. This is a project that I knew I needed to complete since November, but it wasn't until last month that I knew what I was going to do. This is going to be part of a special collection of small quilts by several designers to raise awareness for Libby Lehman. She is a quilt artist and teacher who suffered a stroke last April.

So, the idea was to look at Libby's quilts and design a quilt inspired by one of her designs. Looking at her designs I knew she loves circles and in her Foliage 5 quilt she has a lot of movement with her design. So, that is how I got my inspiration of the "flares" in solar flares. The sun centers is the circles from the other parts of her designs.

I wanted to have the quilt be a gradual hot sun that we sometimes see as red when there is smoke in the air from fires in the summers. The red then becomes a brilliant orange and yellow sun that we are blessed to have each day. Because I sketched this out on paper first, I wanted to have the quilting look like I was sketching it out. This explains the thick quilting lines around each main design element of the quilt.

I used Superior Threads gold metallic thread to show off the design in an awesome way,

with two layers of wool batting and my dense "fantabulous filler" to make the design "pop."

There are seven different colors in the quilt. I put together a large traditional star block for the background of the quilt. I love how it all came together.

As you can see in the top of the above picture, I was able to capture the shine from one of the hundreds of crystals I put into the quilt. This quilt is the first time I have experimented with crystals and I have to tell you that I love it. The picture does not give this element of the quilt top justice, but I can tell you that it looks amazing and I am so happy with the results.

The shiny crystals and the shiny thread compliment each other so well.

The big sun is my favorite element in this design. The cross-hatch centers worked perfectly to add the crystals to.

Isn't the texture amazing?

The back of the quilt top is amazing. I think this would have been a wonderful whole cloth quilt as well, but I love the seven different shades of fabric for the top.