Peggy brought this quilt to me a couple of months ago.  She said “no rush” which was good because although it looked fun I had absolutely no clue what to do with it, all I saw was a lot of thread changes in my future.  In the meantime I did a bunch of other quilts both custom and edge to edge but this one was always in the back of my mind, however my mind was still blank as to how to quilt this!  Once I loaded it I decided to start with the fur, but how on earth do you quilt so that it looks like fur?  After staring at it for hours I just went for it, I did a stipple meander for fur, then pebbles for the football texture, the ideas were finally coming.  Next it was a crosshatch for the orange jersey and mask.  Then tiny straight lines for the black part of the jersey and helmet.  I am particularly proud of the crosshatch, I did it all by hand using my straight edge Quilted Pineapple Rulers which are a lifesaver.  Crosshatch is in itself and epic challenge and I am pretty happy with how mine turned out.  So next it was adding character to the face, check out the teeth!  Then what to do with the sky?  I had it in my mind that I wanted some kind of cloud design but I wasn’t confident on how to set it up so that my machine would stitch the clouds inside the borders and outside of the beaver.  I figured that out and look at the clouds!!!!  Next was the painstaking piano key inner black border, all done by hand with my mini straight edge ruler.  The next huge challenge was what the heck to do in the patchwork border.  I was totally stumped.  I thought I would do a different motif in the brown and the orange but it wasn’t sitting well with me.  In the end I found this Football and Stars design that I set up as an edge to edge inside the 2 black borders.  Well that worked, phew!  Last was the outer black border.  Originally I wanted to do a border design but in the end I decided another piano key border done by hand again was the right choice. 

This seemingly innocent cute little Beaver Quilt was truly a challenge of my quilting skills, I used every technique imaginable and learned so many more.  I am so happy to have finished it and I really hope Peggy is thrilled with my work!  It was a pleasure to bring him to life!