Turtle Quilt

I started this quilt last March for my totally awesome guy. I had found a pattern in a quilting magazine and adapted it for "grown-ups" (it was originally a little kid quilt with bright colors and simple sashing with wide borders and only 8 squares). I had gotten the fabrics a while back and had them sitting and waiting for me to take the time to do something with them. Well, March was our anniversary, so my gift to him was my time to make this for him. With some tweaking and a lot of patience, it ended up being a queen size quilt. I put flannel on the back and tried to choose batiks that looked watery. Every one of the 25 turtles is completely different, I used about 20 fabrics in shades of blue, green and purple and even the backgrounds of every turtle was 5 different shades of blue Now I'm at the hard part: trying to quilt what feels like a behemoth of a quilt. I wanted something different for the quilting and turned to my most favorite embroidery web page: Embroidery Library. They have designs specifically for quilting with your embroidery machine. I wanted the quilting to be in the turtle shells and maybe the sashing. I decided on different flowers and stipple quilting shapes to have each shell be different. But I cannot find the design I have in mind for the sashing pieces. My pieces are 5 inches by 12 inches. My idea is to put some wavy lines emulating seaweed there, but no one has a quilting design for that. I'll probably end up either hand quilting that or trying to do some free-hand embroidery to get that effect. But in the meantime, my quilt has the inner squares quilted and only 9 of the outer squares need to be done. Here's some shots of the quilt while being quilted:








We were just so tired after all of this, it was definitely naptime