Quilt 141: Gembrook - DONE!

Last year Elle Blue Fabrics - an Australian fabric manufacturer - announced it was shutting down production.  My favorite quilt shop - Patchwork With Gail B - decided to have a special sale of their stock, focusing on Elle Blue line.  Of course I always love a bargain, so I picked up a few bits and pieces, including this jelly roll called "Gembrook".

Gembrook is very special to me because my lovely friend Sharon - who passed away from ovarian cancer a couple of years ago - lived in a small town called Gembrook.  I miss Sharon a lot - but whenever I hear her name, or the name "Gembrook", I always smile.

Here's what the jelly roll had in it:

All the strips are soft pastels with a dove-grey tint to them.  I happened to already have some dove grey solid fabric - sent to me as a gift from the Missouri Star Quilt company with a fairly large fabric order I placed last year.

And here's what I did with that jelly roll:

51" x 67" - quilted on the Bernina G-Matic ("Smoke 2" stitch design) - Bamboo Batting

It's based on a sample quilt I saw hanging in Gail B's shop the day I bought the jelly roll.  Their sample, however, had four bars of jelly rolls, where I have 3.

Very simple, but quite effective, visually.  I just sewed the strips together and then split the top three ways, inserting that solid dove grey between and around them.  I really like the effect - and will, I'm sure, do more of this design.

The backing and binding are done with a coordinating print from the same manufacturer (and also on sale at the time):

Here's the stitch design I used for the quilting:

And here's a closeup of the top showing the quilting (the sides of the strip bar look crooked in this photo, but they're not - it's just the way the quilt was laying when I took the picture):