world and paper airplanes

I've been on a roll finishing quilts this week!  First up, the map and paper airplane quilt.  It is for a lovely, although unmet, girl who made her appearance in the world about six months ago.  The family is currently in the middle east, but they're coming home for a vacation in a month...so it'll be just the right time to give it to her!

The center is a panel that doesn't seem to be around much anymore.  The paper airplanes where designed by Kristy from Quiet Play and you can find the (free!) pattern here.

This quilt had several firsts...the first time I experimented with tea dying and the first time I did a bit of hand quilting.  I ended up doing tea dying because I didn't look at the pattern closely enough before buying the fabric and didn't realize that I needed three different fabrics.  So I solved it by dying the inner fold and giving the paper a white back.  My biggest fear is that the tea stain will fade over time or over washes, but I'll probably never find out.

I also did a bit of hand quilting to make the flying lines.  They're hard to see...the thread I choose was a little bit too light.  But they're there, all nice and chunky.  It was a nice thing to do while my son played outside, so I might need to work on getting a small quilt top ready this winter for next summer and only hand quilt it.

Lastly, the quilting.  The sea and air have swirls.  I used a varigated blue and white by Aurifil...it was getting near the end of the spool and I had a few more breaks than I normally do with Aurifil thread.  The continents are pebbled (because land has rocks) with a thread color that matched the continent color.  Oh, and the red border has wonky diamonds.