R is for Rain

I finished a quilt yesterday.  Our quilt guild is having a challenge where you make a mini-quilt with a theme that starts with the letter "R".  I've wanted to do an umbrella quilt for a long time, and I recently (and accidentally) unearthed some forgotten charm squares with a rain theme.  Rain + umbrella = works for me.

The squares were given to me a few years ago.  I had enough to make one nine-patch for the front, and another for the back.  The quilt is supposed to be 12" but because I used charm squares, it came in a little larger, at 14" square.

I put the darkest square in the center, then fused a 4-section bright yellow umbrella over them all.

Umbrellas have pointy things at the top, so I found a pointy bead to use up there.

You can see that each of the umbrella sections is a different fabric.  I just dug through my yellow scraps until I found four that looked good together.

I machine stitched the fused edges, then tried a succession of different handwork until I found one I liked.  I settled on chain stitches since they looked like a drop of water, then added a seed bead at the top of each one for some sparkle.

The bottom of the umbrella is edged in bugle and seed beads.  At the pointy ends, I stacked two sizes of beads to look like the spoke ends.

Tucked under the umbrella, seen through the distance of the stormy grey sky, is our destination: a happy place.  Sun shines down on a cute little pink house, flowers in the garden, and a dog in the front yard.

The quilting is sheets of rain falling down.  I hand-stitched the binding, not my usual machine stitching.

The back. 

With all the embroidery on the front, the back wasn't as neat as I would have liked.  I tried to carry stitches where I could, but there still remained enough visible ones.  I had a plan to make a big fat cloud label, big enough to cover the mess.  But that would have covered up too many of the cute squares, so I made a downsized cloud instead, and told myself to relax about it.