Latin Express

I made this quilt in Begin with Bev II at Eddie's Quilting Bee. We made the pinwheels using Thangles - totally cool! At the time I thought they were fun, but never having worked with half-square triangles in any other way, I didn't fully appreciate them. I do now. :)

The focus fabric is a woven Guatemalan fabric. I didn't know enough not to use that for quilting, and I'm glad I didn't. I chose it because I loved it! There were lots of bright colors to pick out for the pinwheels. Because there were stripes in the fabric, I had to think carefully before cutting, but it worked out fine. I mitered the border corners, which I think look spiffy. I added the turquoise border to make the blue pop.



This is an earlier stage, when I was playing around with color placement. I include it here because the colors of the pinwheels show up better than in the other photo. You can really see the difference between the green and blue here.



This is the back of the quilt. It's just a solid piece of fabric, but the very bright cups of coffee jumped out and said "Buy me!" when I was in the quilt shop.

The quilt is called "Latin Express" as something of a play on words. The Guatemalan fabric and the coffee made it Latin, and the pinwheels reminded me of wheels, like on an express train. Express, of course, is similar to espresso.

I made this quilt for my mother for Mother's Day. The original idea had been to use brightly colored pinwheels with a black and white crossword puzzle fabric (she works them daily) that I had seen, but on closer inspection, the crossword turned out to be filled in with sewing words. That wasn't appealing to me, so I kept the bright colors, which my mother usually likes, and looked around for another focus fabric. I really liked the Guatemalan one, and it seemed appropriate since we lived in Central America for a few years. She says she likes the quilt, and I hope she does!