Light at the End of the Tunnel Quilt

I'm calling this quilt The Light at the End of the Tunnel.

I made it for a dear friend who has been having a really rough year; it's been one of those years that proves bad things sometimes happen to wonderful people.  She's hanging in there like a champ and I know she's going to come out on the other side of this as an even stronger and more amazing woman than she went in.

I wanted something that was a cross between traditional and contemporary.  It needed to be firm and yet fun.  Something to commemorate my friend's zest for life, and yet not ignore the darkness that she's faced in the recent past. (I know, that's a lot to ask of a quilt.  This is how much thought I put into the gifts I make.)  I think I got it right.

It's a really nice deep eggplant color on the front.  I had a hard time getting these pictures to show the color well.  The string-pieced star is about a foot and a half across.  It's made of various blue, purple, and grey fabrics.

The backing on this one is a small floral print of purple and blue flowers.  I chose it because I knew that it would hide the imperfections in my quilting.  It was very forgiving!

The binding is a combination of the backing and front fabrics.  I wanted a little bit of a scrappy look around the edges to complement the scrap-pieced star on the front.  Because of the way my quilt model was holding the quilt, it's hard to see the eggplant color in the binding- it's around the top edges of the quilt.

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Bonus picture:  Just for fun-sies, I asked Jeff to make it look like the quilt was blowing in the wind.  Here is a picture of him kicking and flapping the quilt to make it billow.  Ha, ha!  I got a real laugh out of asking him to pose the quilt in different ways.  It's Valentine's Day, so he went along with it.  

You can't see it, but behind the quilt in this picture, dark things are being muttered.  The things we do for love...