Cupcake Quilt

This piece is so special to me! It is my first commissioned quilt! I had the honor of designing this concept with my client, who is also a friend. I started by gathering some ideas of things that were significant or special to her (cupcakes), and color scheme that she loved, then presented her with some mock up drawings. She loved my design and I was so excited to get started!

I chose the six materials just because I really liked the way they all worked together. The only materials not shown are the satin red and pink I used to make the cherry and frosting. You can see from my drawing that I originally was going to add pink sprinkles but changed that idea because as I progressed I wanted something a little more fantasy based. So I added swirls of iridescent stars and I love how dreamy they make this cupcake.

This was a pretty simple design and although it may look easy to piece it's pretty hard to sew such perfectly straight lines across about 5 feet on each side and each panel or material. It was very stressful to work with the satin and again I had to enlist the help of my friend Jessie Hagen, who has been a long time quilter and all around amazingly brilliant crafter of all sorts! I would not recommend working with satin unless you are experienced and have the determination and patience to get it right. Another warning about satin: never use fusible batting with it - even if the package says it doesn't bleed onto fabric! This is not true when working with satin. The glue from the batting soaked through my satin and made it a darker pink in that area.

The flowers you see around the top trim of the cupcake wrapper are little crafting flowers I got from the ribbon section at JoAnn's and each one is hand sewn onto the quilt top.And the whole cupcake from cherry stem to cupcake wrapper was appliqued onto the quilt top. The swirls were difficult because of all the smooth directional changes. But well worth it in the outcome.

Even through the difficulties, I love everything about this quilt from the boldness in it's simple design, the clean precision of the lines, the color scheme, the satin centerpiece, the dreamy stars, the quilted designs in the corners, and the brickwork backing. It also earned a written appraisal of $590 as an art quilt from the wonderfully talented and knowledgeable Cindy Brick (http://cindybrick.com/about-cindy) I just can't say enough about how proud I am of this piece. It truly is a work of art and will always hold a special place in my heart.