Jewel box daisy

I am SO happy right now.  I started this quilt a month ago and finished it today.  Cutting out and sewing together all the blocks was so easy and was 'speed' pieced together in no time at all.  I knew I had a deadline to meet (today was my target date), so I needed to get on with the quilting.
Off course, nothing ever goes exactly to plan and when I started ironing my backing piece, which had been pre-washed, I discovered a red thread running through the white fabric, approximately halfway down!  I had specially bought this piece, which is extra wide backing, and now, when I am about to start quilting, I had to drop everything and go shopping for another piece in the same colour!  This was just not happening, we were about to go away for a long weekend with friends and I had no time for shopping, but I had a plan!
Having looked up where the nearest quilt shops are at our weekend destination, I started scheming how I was going to get to the quilt shops.  Lucky for me, my dear friend is also a quilter, so we packed the men off walking and shopping we went.  First quilt shop we got to had closed a long time ago (no updates on internet), so my hopes were on the second shop, which turned out to be set up in a residential area in someones conservatory!  Needs must so in we went.  Of course, no extra wide fabrics in stock, so I just had to buy some other lovely little fabric bundles that I fell in love with.  Don't they just look divine?  No idea yet what I will do with them.

I finally managed to track down some more backing fabric the following week, so set about to start quilting.  I didn't really want to do an all over pantograph design, even though for me, this would be the quickest way to get it quilted.  The quilt is a leaving present for someone that have been in our lives for the last 8 years and I wanted it to be a special quilt.

I wanted to separate the border areas of the quilt and make them frame the main body of the quilt, and this for me means freemotion quilting, so I started doodling my initial designs out on paper.  The fabric I used to make the quilt is from Moda and called 'Sunkissed'  and the fabrics included daisies, scrolls, circles and script.  This was my starting point.

I settled on large oversized daisies in the same style as the daisies in the fabric and then marked out where I wanted to quilt the daisies. In the open areas in between the daisies,  I decided to quilt scrolls, these would have to be done freestyle as the spaces between the daisies were not uniform.  The background was then filled in with pebbling.

The inner border was quilted in a scroll design, I did drew this out first so that I could be sure that it would fill the border space exactly.  The outside border was quilted with a pantograph, which consisted mainly of scrolls, but had some daisy petal shapes, which tied the whole design nicely together.

I have just ordered some new labels for putting on my quilts and these came this morning, which meant I could sew the binding in place and the quilt is now ready.

This quilt is all about sunshine and happiness so I hope that by giving this quilt, I can share all this with the person receiving it.