Sew Special Lanterns

Last night I finished my Chinese Lantern quilt.  I named it Sew Special Lanterns because a friend bought the fabric as a gift to me from Sew Special while she was on vacation in Maui, Hawaii.  I thought it was so special of her to do that.  And the fabric was so special that it made for the fastest turnaround from fabric to finished quilt in my history.

The pattern is from Paper Piecing with Alex Anderson. 

I changed up the border from what was in the book.  Instead of piano keys, I went with plain white, then added cornerstones from the lantern fabric.  For just a touch of color, the border quilting is wavy lines of different colored thread.

I hadn't planned on the buttons until I found an impossible-to-remove spot in the border.  I covered it with a button, then just kept adding more.  It wasn't until I developed the photograph that I realized the choice of where to place the buttons was subliminally dictated by the color of the cornerstone blocks.

I did three types of quilting:

1. echo quilting on the lanterns
2. trefoil motif in the corners of the large lantern blocks (I wanted to do the quatrefoil that was on the fabric, but the trefoil fit better in that space)
3. parallel lines in the white blocks

 

Close-up view of the border.

The back.  Why do I keep making such huge labels?  I did this one in a rush and I see that it's crooked.  49% of me wants to do it over.  

Because I was in a rush, I didn't want to paper piece it like the lanterns on the front.  So it's an abstract version of a Chinese lantern.