Forth Bridge EPP lap quilt is finished!

If anyone has visited Leanne’s blog for the FAL tutorial’s this week, this quilt will be familiar to you from the Hand Quilting Tute that I posted there yesterday.
Thanks to all of you who left such lovely comments and feedback over there (and here!). I’m really pleased you found it useful.

I designed this EPP pattern as part of the Travellin’ PicStitch blog hop that Katy and Laura were doing to tie in with their trip to Sewing Summit last year. The idea was that you chose a holiday photo or one of a local landmark, and fed it through one of those colour separation aps and then used that as a basis for an EPP project. You can read more about how I did this here.

I chose one of my husband’s photos of the Forth Rail Bridge which I can see from the top of my field, and designed an EPP pattern inspired by the famous geometry of the bridge. However some people (that live with me) have suggested that they can’t really see any sign of the Forth Bridge in the finished quilt top.
So to make things a little more obvious I decided to hand quilt part of the bridge in to the wide top borders. This involved drawing it by hand on to the quilt top which was really quite tricky. Luckily I was using my new best friend, the Frixion pen by Pilot, which disappears like magic with the touch of a hot iron.

Hopefully you can see the bridge emerging in this photo below (not the easiest thing to photograph!) even though it is a bit squashed by the width of the border.

It measure 38.5″ by 32″, which I am hoping is the right size for a wheelchair lap quilt for my old dad (89!). He is doing really well at the moment but gets tired out walking any distance. My sister and I like to take him away for mini breaks and have a trip to Whitby planned for early June (and believe me he will still need something to protect him from the North Sea gales even at that time of year!).

I’ve backed it with flannel (which glows ethereally in photos!) so it should be nice and cosy for him. It’s the first time I have used flannel to back a quilt. I found it very easy to hand quilt.

I used perle cotton throughout in white, except for the blue inner border which is quilted in Gutermann’s cotton (for the sake of the tute!).
A few people have asked me about a pattern for this design and it is on my long list. Hopefully I will get around to it sometime this year.

As usual I am really pleased with the outcome (I don’t think I’ve ever made a quilt that I haven’t been a little in love with once it’s finished, I think it’s down to all the work that went in to it), but it’s earned rare praise indeed from my husband who said “Now, that’s a proper quilt!”.
Not really sure what he means by this and what is says about all my other quilts, but I’ll gladly take it!