For Michelle

My brother was living in a town in the Nilgiris ranges in the south of India. This was in early 2011. The high altitude gives Ooty the privilege of being a 'no fan station'. It is cold round the year - the only variation being the degrees of coldness during the different seasons.
What better thing to give my little niece Michelle than a quilt !!! And thus began my project.

• the size - it had to big enough for her to be able to use it even 5-7 years down the line - she was four then. it was decided to make it to an approximate size of three and a half feet by 6 feet.
• the design - after a lot of contemplation and a lot of net searches i thought a theme would be best. something which was babyish enough, yet wasn't too babyish that she wouldn't dare be seen with it when older. i decided on turtles and fish.
• the colours - i wanted to shift from the typical girl means pink. decided to use shades of green - plain and printed. i find it to be a calming colour. i also decided to add a dash of yellow for brightness.
• the materials - for the top i picked up some light coloured, striped, shirt material - the choice was the texture and the shine. For the batting i hunted the lanes of my neighbourhood and found poly fill sheets. For the backing it was a light green cotton cloth (shown in the picture below).

This was my first big project - many question marks but even more excitement. I drew a rough sketch about how the quilt would shape out and look and for a really good idea, i coloured using colour pencils. Then came the templates for the turtles and the fish. I sourced the fabrics from the only cloth shop next door - no particular plan except that it had to be in shades of green. Most of the cloth was what they call lizzy-bizzy. 

I first started by cutting out the shapes, pinned them onto the shirt material. I then hand tucked these on to the material with big running stitches. Each shape was then appliqued by hand. For a more prominent outline, the flippers and the heads of the turtles were blanket stitched with the same shade as that of the fabric. The body of the fish were also blanket stitched. 

The borders were machine stitched. The backing cloth was cut to size as also the batting.  The quilt top, the batting and the backing were layered and hand tucked together. The piping strip was attached to the backing material.This was followed by machine stitching them close to the edge. The piping was then folded over the  quilt top and hand stitched.

I decided to have happy animals, so the smiling faces. I stuck on eyes and they indeed added their own charm to it. 

I worked on the quilt for almost seven hours a day and managed to complete it in a weeks time. Michelle loved the quilt - found it 'nice-nice' and 'cozy-cozy'.