The Last Quilt (?)

I made this quilt when we lived in Abu Dhabi.  I'm calling it the Last Quilt because I don't really plan on making many more quilts. (How many do you need? We only have 2 beds!)

A friend helped pick out the main fabric & then I did a bunch of tests w/ the leaves, green swirly, dark purple & the pale purple to see which showed off the pattern the best.  I originally thought I'd use the dark purple, too, but though it matched, it was just too dark, & because it is solid, too boring w/ the pale purple (which has a pattern, but hard to see in these photos).  You can see which version won out above.  I really like how it's sort of an optical illusion:  is the green floating on the pale purple?  

Here are a few more up close photos which show the swirly machine quilting.  I like it because it matches the swirliness of the green fabric, too.  Denise at Upstairs Quilting machine-quilted it for me & it looks amazing.  It has bamboo/cotton batting inside, which she said was really nice to work with.

Below you can see that the actual quilt top was rather small, so I added three borders. First the checkerboard using the dark purple.  Then I (fortunately) had plenty of the leaf fabric, so made that border nice & wide.  But even then, when I pulled it out of the box in the basement a while back, I could see it wouldn't be big enough for our queen-sized beds.  So I found the plain purple border (far right in photo below) at Hancock Fabric and added that.  That's the fabric I'll do the binding with, too.  

For the back, again, I was thinking Last Quilt, so I made an attempt to use up as many scraps & fat quarter sets as I could.  It's very scrappy & doesn't match at all, but I think it's sort of fun.  And we can flip over the quilt every once in a while for a change.

I had so many great sets that friends have given me over the years; you can see two of them here, but we don't really have the sort of house where I have lots of quilted things laying around or hanging, and so I attempted to use a small percentage of them up--at least I'll see them a bit more now that they are no longer living in a box of fat quarters!

Tilly always does such a good job remembering to add a song...I often forget, but there is always music in my head--my big problem is getting that song out so I can concentrate!  

Here's a fun one:  Travis Tritt, Here's a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)