Quilt 10: DONE! ("Forbidden Palace")

It took over a year to get this finished, but I finally did it! And here it is:

(click the photo for a larger view)

I tried different ways to lay this one out so you could see it, ended up just pinning it to my bedroom drapes. A little weird, maybe, but at least you can see the whole thing. There are 160 rectangular blocks (80 different Japanese prints), and each block is made into a kind of "snowball block" with the addition of black tips on each corner. The overall effect reminds me of a stained glass window. So why did it take so long? Oh, well, there were a couple of projects in the meantime which took my focus, but the biggest reason is just how time-consuming the quilting was. You can see how I quilted it by looking at the back:

(click the photo for a larger view)

I used my "swirly" template - it fit exactly two swirls into each rectangle on the top - so was perfect for the quilt design. I stitched with silvery grey thread (thanks to suggestion made by my quilting guru Pauline - THANKS PAULINE!) It took a long time - esp. since, with the swirls changing direction, there was no way to really build much momentum in the hand-quilting. But the results are stunning and I'm thrilled.