Ellie's Quilt

I've finally started working on Ellie's quilt. Three weeks before I fly away. :|
Nothing like a deadline for motivation! August seems to be a good quilt month for me anyway, so here I am again, working on quilt #7. Thank goodness Matt and Anya aren't planning on having kids too soon! Maybe I'll get their quilt and Vienna's and Ziva's done and their new sibling's quilts done before Matt and Anya add any more to my list. lol

Ellie's quilt design is about taking a walk in the garden. I was thinking of doing purples and pinks and something with butterflies for her, but it has turned out to have a lot more greens and browns in with those purples and pinks than I had originally anticipated. But I like it.
I cut and pieced the squares last week. It went pretty quickly and today I started working on the quilting part. I haven't fully decided what I'll do for the quilting, it is kind of a "take it as it comes to me" type thing.
The brown strips are the pathways through the garden. The green is foliage and the other squares are flower plots. It will have a couple of borders, a more brown one and then a more pink/purple/flower one. The backing is this really pretty brown material I found the other day. It is so soft and smooth and the design is girly even if it is in brown. But somehow even the brown seems like it is a girly brown to me. I had originally planned to use a different material, with butterflies all over it, but it was much coarser and not quite the right size, so when I saw this I just had to get it.
Now all I need to do is sew like a maniac for the next two weeks and we should be all good!
I've been planning this quilt for several years and it has gone through several variations until I came up with this one. I wanted something that was not impossible to piece and could also be kept in smaller pieces to be quilted as quilting a full-size quilt is a difficult task. I'll put the backing on after I have quilted the squares and sewed them all together and then I will probably quilt a few simple lines through all the layers for stability. But we'll see. It's a work in progress!