Finished 25 March 2018

This quilt came to me while watching video tutorials from the Missouri Star quilt company. Their tutorial makes the classic Quatrefoil quilt look easy. Of course, I had to complicate matters by fussy-cutting the center patches, and give it a curved border.

I used an antique-looking beige toile print for the background, giving the whole quilt a look of the old Dutch or French still-life paintings.

I ran out of the background before I could add the outer border, but fortunately I had a big piece of an almost perfect match in a tonal print for the border. The border design I have in mind will be so ornamental that the difference in the fabric won't even be noticed.

Here is the top, on the table for pinning.

The Quilting

I used a scrolled template for quilting the blocks with each fruit and its leaves outlined like applique. I traced the feathered border motifs from a book using a lightbox. The scrolling inner border was based on one of Cindy Needham's stencils from her borders collection, while the bead-board fill in the outer border was from one of her background stencils.

Here's a detail of the border quilting, showing the curved lines drawn in for the curved border. I didn't cut that line until I had the binding sewn along the line. Then I trimmed about 3/8" away from the line to give the binding some padding.

And the final finished quilt, with the curved border bound in a matching dark turquoise. The binding was folded over to the back and stitched down by hand.