Big yellow quilt

After my Aunt sadly passed away my Uncle and cousin downsized. My Uncle gave me a large yellow commercially produced "quilt".  I am sure you will have seen the kind I mean, only one layer of material which acts as the top with a wadding of sorts as the back and some quilting through the two.  It was very, very large.  My Aunt and Uncle had picked it for its cheerful sunny colour.

As it was now going to be to big for its original use he hoped I would be able to use in in my quilting. Perhaps just as a substitute for wadding.

It joined many another item in the loft while I mulled things over.  It would need to be a dark or heavy material for it not to show through.  Or perhaps yellow so it was enhanced.

That line of thought lead to OK make a yellow quilt, the next step was somewhat obvious make a yellow quilt for my uncle in a size he could use.

My original intent was to make it a quick pattern, big squares to sew up fast. Two shades of yellow in solids and one large floral pattern which includes shades of yellow.

It did not work out quite like that, I sort of complicated my basic nine patch plan with different sizes of squares.  The trouble with squares is well corners and straight edges, Have I mentioned having issues with corners and edges?  Well I do find them a challenge.   

Part way through the process I began to think perhaps the quilt would be a bit heavy with the yellow as the filling.  So I wondered, could I use it as both the middle and the backing with a binding?  Yes that would work, the original quilting was a double lines square pattern.  I made a cardboard template (cereal boxes are so useful) to add the flowers.

The yellow thread I used had an odd almost magical quality on the top of the quilt, it reflected the colour of each different patch.  It was from a bag of thread gifted to me, it came without labels so I have no idea what it was other than exactly right for this project and all used up by the end.  At some stage a mad idea began to make itself felt. To not use a binding but bring the backing to the front.  A lot of people don'e like self binding even when it is the normal thin backing material.  This was rather more cumbersome.  However I liked the idea of the "sunny" fabric with its memories being visible on the top.

So over it went,  and it expanded the size quite a bit.  The extra volume did make it trickier than normal.  I like it's subtle sunshinyness and have entitled it Sewn Sunshine Memory.