Wandering in a Jeweled Rainforest

Today I was woken rather earlier than I had hoped by a pair of marauding felines, so I decided to get my day started early by working on one of my Finish Along projects. The Jeweled Rainforest quilt has haunted me for quite some time. I made the top at Stitch during an afternoon of fun. Sadly Stitch is no more, but the Rainforest quilt top glows on. I freely admit that I have had my doubts about this creation. Too bright? Gaudy? Tasteless? So it lurked around waiting patiently.

This is a stack and slash quilt. Eight fat quarters are stacked, then cut across with the rotary cutter, rearranged and sewn back together. Then the stack is slashed again, recombined and sewn. Repeat, and repeat and repeat until you have a set of lovely blocks. The sharper the angles of the cuts, the more abstract looking the result. No, this is not a tutorial (a bit vague) - but I'm sure one wouldn't be hard to find if you go Googling. My only tip for making one of these is to use a new rotary cutter blade as you need a good sharp one to get through the layers.

I found the most perfect fabric for the backing - an amazing wide Echino linen (blend?) spot in a brilliant loud pink.

Good friends, I think.

I had a lot of help this morning. Fergus seems to be determined to lose his whiskers.

He already thinks the top looks very inviting.

We had quite a battle over the batting.  

I got rather a large piece of batting to use for at least two quilts, and had quite a lot of trouble getting it trimmed to size.

Nothing to do with the batting... the brawl going on between my furry assistants made the job very difficult. This batting is a high quality poly batting that feels very soft and dense. Apart from teeth and claws, it was so easy to work with. I usually choose wool or cotton, but this is actually brilliant stuff. I got it at Cottonfields.

I usually pin baste on the hard floor in the hall, but this quilt is too wide, so I just did it on the carpet and (gasp!) didn't tape the backing to the floor. It all sat together beautifully, and I methodically smoothed and pinned in quarters, working from the middle outwards.

Mr Mouse decided to test the quilt in the early stages too. He approved.

So I pinned and pinned and pinned. I really don't enjoy pinning.

But it is worth it because now the fun begins. As I pinned I considered how to quilt this. I am going to stitch around all of the different patches so that there are frames on the reverse, and then I will free motion quilt inside the frames to suit each fabric design. Hopefully this will result in an interesting quilting pattern on the reverse side. Yes - lots and lots of fun!