a finished quilt

Well, I finished this nearly a month ago. My camera has the photos dated Jan 17th and I'm pretty sure that's correct.
I remember the snow was beginning to melt that day and I hurried to finish sewing down the binding so I could get some pictures before things got wet and slushy outside.

I had intended to have it finished months ago - because it was a gift for my lovely and talented younger sister, who was celebrating her 50th birthday.

I don't think she noticed it was late though - she was in Hawaii to celebrate the day. 

As she said...Hawaii five-oh  (50 -get it? - 50th birthday?)

It was a challenging quilt to put together. The actual piecing of the blocks was easy, but the hard part was trying to get the colors distributed evenly...and really just making decisions about which color to use where. 

 I did change a couple of things from the original pattern.  One thing was the border.

As you can see below - the pattern had a saw tooth border but I thought instead I'd like to go ahead and use up some of the leftovers of fabrics used in the quilt to make a checkerboard border.

Another change...see that large section of green and gold squares at the bottom of the quilt in the pattern photo below?   It's supposed to look like plowed/planted fields.
As I was putting the quilt together this section kept bugging me.  The rest of the quilt is made from much smaller pieces and I felt like these giant squares looked like an afterthought just to make the quilt longer...so I cut half of them off.

I also pieced some triangles for the mountains so they wouldn't look so much like pyramids. But then the snow covered tops nearly disappeared in the clouds.

The blue floral backing is not the best match but I wanted to use this fabric because it had such a soft and smooth hand (feel).

I tried something different when pin basting this quilt. It's a method I read about on the internet.

  I rolled the top on to a pool "noodle", then after smoothing out the backing and batting, I lined it all up and pinned as I unrolled the top.  It's a good system - everything stayed smooth and flat.

Here is one last photo that I snagged from Joy's facebook page.  I think she likes it!

One of these days, when she gets tired of building and piloting airplanes, parasailing, stand-up paddle boarding, zip lining, snorkeling, river tubing and all of that kind of stuff...I am going to see if she would like to come over sometime and sew quilts with me.