Island Chain by me, for David and Joy

 First I have to say how very lucky I am to have married someone as wonderful as my darling husband Randall.  Who designed my website for me, by the way.  Then there was the added bonus of wonderful siblings and parents that he brought with him.  Then we have Joy and David, the sister and brother in law of Randall's mother.  Lovely people as well.  They were in the process of moving back to Hawaii, and Joy spent the night at our house before going to the airport the next day.  A few weeks later I got an e-mail from Joy asking if I would make a quilt for their guest room "just like" the one in our guest room.  She would choose the fabrics, or at least make suggestions as to the colors, and I'd get all the fun of making and quilting the quilt.  She looked for fabric swatches on the island, but found only Asian and island prints.  Darn, I have to go shopping for fabric!  Armed with one swatch that she was able to find, and two paint chips, off we went to the fabric store.  The piecing was fun, and I think that my piecing has improved since I made our Double Irish Chain quilt back in 2003. 
Then I got to the quilting!  All done with Glide "Cream" thread.  A slight shine to it, but still traditional.  Wool batting.  I know, it's going to Hawaii, but still.  I wanted the loft of the wool, and Joy had said that this wouldn't be a "sleeping under" quilt.  I must say that I'm quite pleased with the end results.

 I knew that I wanted to do a feathered wreath in the open background blocks.  Something pretty traditional.

 What to do in the "chains"?   I thought about continuous curves, but wasn't that enthralled.  Then I started to look through my class handouts and found one from Dawn Cavanaugh, Director of Education for APQS.  Here it is!  This is what I want to do!

I love to quilt feathers, so that was the obvious choice for the sage borders.  They all meet in the middle of the border and then "grow" out from the center. 










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I did do continuous curves in the on point squares in the border, but they still needed something in the background of the squares.  More feathers!  Again, "growing" out in both directions from the center.










My favorite part is the backing where you can really see the quilting.  I chose a cream tone on tone print in 108" wide so no seams in the backing.

Once the quilting was finished, I didn't have enough of any of the fabrics for the binding, and I wasn't thrilled with the idea of using any of them anyway.  Back to the fabric store!  Personally, I like my binding to be slightly darker than the border so that they form a frame for the quilt.  I found a marbleized print that picked up the darker tone in brown fabrics perfectly