Fantasy Flying Fish
Date made: September 2002
You might remember that I made a Double Wedding Ring quilt for my oldest daughter's high school graduation. However, we both decided that, not knowing the safety factor for possessions in the dorm, we didn't want to run the risk of some deadbeat putting the snatch on the DWR quilt. I would be devastated if it were stolen.
But I still wanted for her to have a quilt from me in the dorm, so I made a 'substitute' quilt for that purpose. We looked through my books and she decided she liked a layout of 2 sizes of flying geese put together to look like fish. It's from Oxmoor House's "Quick Quilts from your Scrap Bag" (ISBN 0-8487-1960-9), specifically the "Fantasy Fish" quilt. Since it's made from the aforementioned flying geese blocks, Catherine promptly renamed hers "Fantasy Flying Fish". :-)
She went thru my stash and pulled a whole bunch of fabrics that she thought would play nicely together as fish. We did buy the newly released small-scale scrolls (from Jennifer Sampou?) in a baby blue as the water and the larger-scale scrolls in deep blue as the outer border. The narrow inner border is a deep red batik.
The backing is a harlequin pattern in blues, purples and golds.
For the quilting itself (because I was seriously running short on time), I stitched in the ditch around each fish then a large meander all over the "water". In the larger outer border, I did a vine-sort of design, seeing as how Catherine is enamored of all things viney. :-) The quilting isn't perfect (I was having some tension problems ...hmmm .. my tension at being under a drop-dead timeframe or the sewing machine acting up? :-) ) but it did get done, it will hold together, it looks nice and most important, Catherine likes it. :-)
She had asked about sew-on google eyes (which a fellow quilter, Cynthia Harris was gracious enough to find for me) for the fish. I wasn't sure if Catherine would actually want the google eyes on the quilt, so I packed them in with the other gear as I drove down one week and will let her eventually decide if she wants them on.