Fabulous Fantasy Fish Quilt

This is the last of the six quilts I made for the 2006 Exchange. It was actually the first one I worked on after my own. It was for Karin and her theme had the great title of "Fabulous Fantasy Fish". I didn't really come up with anything terribly imaginative when it came to the fish (which were cut from patterned fabric and raw edged appliqued and quilted) but I did experiment a bit with the surface - I made silk fusion paper for the background, bought a darning foot for my very old but trusty Janome so I could free wheel with the background quilting, created texture using puff paint and gold embossing for the ocean floor, stitched into it, dyed muslin for seaweed and sewed on small beads for a bit of interest. All up it was a lot of fun (and I learnt a lot in the process, including a lot of "what not to do"!)