Trip Around the World

I love what I do for a living, working for the Army, but one of the sad things about what I do is that people leave. About every three years families pack up and move on to their next station. It makes it hard to get to know people when they leave so quickly. 

But every now and then someone makes a big difference. I have been lucky enough to have several of these people in my life - people who helped me become a better person. This month we are saying goodbye to one of those people. My dear friend Stacy (in the middle) is moving.

Stacy is leaving for a really great reason - she got a promotion to a division chief position! This is what she should be doing. She is absolutely incredible at what she does. She worked as the Financial Management Chief here in our garrison, and as such she helped SO MANY of us! We had to throw her a really great send off! 

I toyed around with different quilt ideas and settled on the Trip Around the World pattern. 

I had wanted to make this for a while and was planning to make it as a sample for the store. But after thinking about it I realized it was the perfect quilt for someone continuing her literal trip around the world!

The fabric is Soho Chic from Moda. (I'm making another sample for the store out of PB & J. I'm half way done with the blocks on that one.)

I used the jelly roll method of making the quilt using this tutorial. I used the scraps to add rows in between the blocks, creating an extra point. I purposely used the blue through the middle of each block to really draw attention to the diamond shape. 

Do you see the little floating blue squares in the first border? That was my favorite little detail. 

For quilting I wanted something travel related. And I wanted to use the Quilt Path and let the computer quilt it. I found some cool castle patterns from one of the digitized patterns companies and thought it was perfect! Can you kind of see the castle?  

The quilt is SO busy that the quilting pattern kind of got lost in the quilt. So blah, but at least she knows it's there. These are the two patterns so you can see how awesome they are!

I had a moment of inspiration when I realized the leftover fabric from the backing was the perfect size for a bag. I sort of used a drawstring bag tutorial from the internet, but I didn't have it with me at the time, so I kind of winged it. It worked out ok! 

Here's Stacy receiving the quilt at the farewell party. She loved it!