Diamond Pop Wedding Quilt

When my niece, Alice, announced that she was getting married to Phil the first thing I thought was "Quilt!".  Oh, um, I mean "Congratulations!".  Yeah, who am I kidding, it was "Quilt!"

I thought I had plenty of time to plan a quilt because my niece lives in the UK but in the end the moment Australia allowed international travel my husband had booked to go back to visit his family so I had a quilt to make in a hurry!  

I asked my sister in law, Helen, for colour inspiration and once I knew the colours were going to be jewel tones I looked through all my UK Love Patchwork & Quilting magazines and knew that Diamond Pop by Lynne Goldsworthy was the perfect quilt.  

We were in lockdown when I needed to start this project and I was unable to go to a fabric store so I purchased 6 different coloured Ombre Fairy Dust Metallic Stars range fabrics online from The Oz Material Girls . The great thing about this fabric range was that it had the light, medium and dark tones I needed for my diamonds in each coloured fabric.  I received fantastic service from the store and they cut and dispatched my fabric immediately but I didn't receive it for another month because of postal issues!  Arghh! At the same time, I bought many metres of white Kona cotton from Hugs 'n Kisses in Tasmania and, ironically, it arrived within a few days.

I loved the quilt I saw, of course, but I like quilts to be as square as possible rather than rectangular so I immediately had to draft my own version on graph paper. The original version was nice and neat and logical and mine left me with lots of puzzling out and partial seams to sew.  But I find that quite fun and interesting!

I couldn't work out how to make the half rectangle triangles even after I googled it so I ended up foundation paper piecing them and I was much happier with the end result.

Here are my diamond blocks going up on the design wall.  

Once the diamonds had been arranged and sewn to the white background pieces this top went onto Judy's Q'nique quilting frame which conveniently, for me, lives at my house! I can't remember what the name of the quilting design is but I wanted to go for something that looked like wind so the diamond kites looked like they were being blown around.

Here I am at retreat in Gisborne hand stitching the binding down.  Those are Judy's feet!

I embroidered the label.

TaDa!  Here's the finished quilt!  Finished just in time for its trip to the UK.

The wedding ceremony wasn't for ages after it landed in the UK so it was a while before they unwrapped the gift but here are Alice and Phil with their new quilt!

And here's a pic of the happy couple on their special day!  Congratulations both!