This One Ended Up Without a Name on the Label

As always, I get to the end of a quilt and am amazed and humbled at how different a quilt looks with added stitching texture. Blue Plumes was put into the hoop back in October. Notice how much lighter it looks before the hand quilting?

Blue Plumes is finished!

That's because I used a brown/black variegated #12 Perle Cotton in all the blue/white ticking striped fabric areas. The thread is super thin, but eventually, all that darker thread starts making its presence known in a very subtle way. 

It's been a little gloomy, but here's the full quilt

Over three-fourths of the quilt was stitched before I finally was able to sigh a huge sigh of relief. For the longest time, I was absolutely positive that it was being over quilted which always annoys me. Why waste all that time and effort when it doesn't seem to bring the quilt any benefit? While hand quilting is incredibly relaxing, I don't just do it to fill time you know!

A closer look at the details...

This quilt is probably the closest to being a 'monochromatic' color scheme than anything else I've attempted in a very long time. Though the connector squares come off as brown in the pictures, close-up they are a very mixed bag of colors including plenty of blue. To be blunt, it wasn't the most exciting quilt to work on. I enjoyed all the different fabrics {love some of them to pieces}, but wowsers, where's the color?

All crumpled and inviting looking

I do adore how the background fabrics in the Fleur De Lis {or whatever these motifs are} pop so wonderfully now that the hand quilting is finished.*sigh  That was my intention from the very beginning {when piecing the quilt actually}, but it's always a mystery until the whole thing is done. Do you know how many times an attempt at 'glow' goes terribly wrong and ends up reading all mushy looking? This time it worked. Yay!

The binding is basically the color of the floor

Much to my dismay, the quilt demanded the rusty brown fabrics for binding. I have to admit that it was very cool to my frugal loving quilting person to use up some of these older languishing fabrics. Yes it was. But I was also mentally crossing my fingers that using brown wouldn't 'dull' the quilt down to the extreme level of boring. Not that I'm opposed to using that color in quilts, but it's sort of a love/hate relationship these days. 

Not a flashy quilt, but I like it anyway....

I think it used to be a safe color for me to use and was almost always a default decision. When in doubt, use brown. Nowadays, it needs to be very intentional and be used to uplift a quilt. Which of course sounds ludicrous to all you hate-on-brown-quilters out there! But yes, it definitely has its place in quilting and in this case, really was the perfect choice. 

Used in the binding area, brown softens the edges of this quilt without leaving it looking vaguely unfinished, something I'm not a big fan of. Plus it doesn't compete at all with the darker blue border and then inadvertently busy up the sides of the quilt. Which, in my opinion, would be a crying shame. The outside of the quilt isn't all that important here. Our eye needs to be looking at the center of the quilt and wondering what exactly was that quilter thinking anyway? Does anyone really know? lol

Oh hey, did I just make an old fashioned looking quilt? Now that it's completely finished up, I'm thinking it looks sort of yummy. All cozy and warm and very comfy looking. Never satisfied with the name 'Blue Plumes', I decided to leave the name off of the label entirely. Off it goes to celebrate one of my younger sisters 25th wedding anniversary! I think that's it for the anniversary quilts until 2028. Hmm... wonder what I'll be creating then?