Tessellated Leaves Reveal

I'm so happy to show every one my first finished quilt for 2015. And yes, today will you will get to see all of it. I did it as a test quilt for Yvonne of Quilting Jetgirl and the pattern is called Tesselated Leaves. I met Yvonne through the New Quilt Bloggers group last year and I have to say I love her work.  She put out the call for testers and I immediately said "please pick me". She had showed the tutorial on her blog and I liked it, but then she started the color wash version and I was in love. I want to make one of those some day, but in the mean time here is the one I made.

She asked for testers for her two color or four color versions. I first thought red and white would be very cool, but then other testers selected the two color option, so she really needed a four color tester. I agreed and then began going through my options. I will say as much as I love fabric, I can struggle with picking colors. Then it hit me, Sharla's fabric would be perfect. Now what is Sharla's fabric, it was a set of 5 fabrics we bought to make a quilt, then it got packed away and we talked about it for months, saying it would be good to use here or there, but we couldn't find it. Then when we did find it we couldn't remember what pattern she was going to use.  So it has sat for months, and every time we talk about doing a quilt it gets pull out and then decided against. The original fabric was rust, yellow, light green, tan and a paisley with all those colors in it. I loved them but needed two dark and two light fabrics. So I dropped the tan and put in a dark green.

My big plan had been to piece and quilt this between Christmas and New Years because I would have 9 days of no work. What I didn't plan was catching the flu during Christmas and not feeling like doing anything but sitting/sleeping for two weeks. I will admit I almost panicked and told her I couldn't do it. But I really wanted to do it. So I started slow and sewed all of the HST and trimmed them. Once they were done, I knew I could do it.

I found that I liked chain piecing the individual leaves, but found doing the blocks one at a time kept me from getting overwhelmed. Now her pattern calls for the seams to be ironed open and at first I thought no, I'm not going to do that. I really like how the seams feel when they nest together, but I soon learned why she did it, there are a lot of seams in each block. Ironing them open was a challenge for me, but I think I did OK.

Yvonne does a great job of explaining each step and although this looks like a very complicated quilt, with her instructions I think anyone can do it. I decided to quilt it in an all over meander.  I had been practicing a different pattern before Christmas, but with being sick I wanted something I knew I could do and do easily. I will say it felt so good to be quilting again. I love the feeling of completing a quilt.

I used the paisley fabric for the back and binding and if you follow my blog you saw it on Friday when I couldn't show the front. I really like how it looks with the colors on the front.

I would really recommend this pattern to anyone, it looks cool, but is very doable. I think I am going to do a two color version of it in red and white at some point in the future. And the color wash version is on my quilt bucket list. Yvonne has the pattern on sale through January 31st for only $6 (a real bargain). You can buy it in her payship store. And if you check out her blog, Quilting Jetgirl, she has links to the other testers pages and I love all the different versions. I think that is what I love about quilting, is the same pattern can take on different lives with the different fabrics used. So I will end with one last photo, just because I can. I think this one shows the colors the best.