Latest quilt project

When one of my friends from college commissioned a quilt for his family, he didn't give me many guidelines about what he wanted - it should be sized to hang on a wall, and the family would really like it to have purple in it somewhere. Luckily, there were several quilt ideas I've had stewing for a while now, and I was able to adapt one of them to fit his needs.

Basically what I did was combine two styles of quilting - Hawaiian and raw-edge applique. The Hawaiian technique usually uses one overall design cut from one piece of fabric the way that kids cut out snowflakes from paper. It's time-consuming, because all of the edges have to be turned under and sewn down by hand, and the whole thing is echo-quilted every 1/2" or so. Here's an example of a typical Hawaiian quilt:

photo credit: http://www.quiltuniversity.com/images/SupplyListPics/NC_HQ101_RedUluSM.jpg

The other technique is raw-edge applique, in which the applique piece is sewn down with a straight machine stitch about 1/8" from the outside of the piece, which is then allowed to fray naturally when the piece is handled and washed. Here's an example of that technique:

photo credit:
http://www.sundropdesigns.com/funstuff/graphics/flor2pansy3.JPG

As far as I can tell, I'm the first person to combine the two techniques into one quilt. I sketched out the design based on one I found on the Internet, and agonized over the fabric choices for way longer than I should have. After ironing out some of the bugs on a quilt for a different friend (sorry, I forgot to take photos before I gave it to her!), I think I've perfected the technique. Here's the result:

The whole quilt is done by machine, with the exception of the final sewing on the binding and the quilt label on the back. The machine quilting made this project go really fast, at least compared to the months it would have taken me to do this by hand. Here's a closeup of the quilting from the back:

And here's a closeup of the applique on the front. I don't think this would work for every quilt pattern, as the frayed edges are definitely a different look than the hard, precise edges you get on a normal Hawaiian quilt. But they give the piece a sort of organic feel, which I like, and they add some tactile interest, too. Plus, did I mention how fast this went together once I had the fabrics picked out? Dude, like, soooo fast.

Now that it's done and the quilt's in the mail, I'm thinking of writing this up for a quilt magazine. Since I've never seen anyone do the technique before, I think an article about it could sell. I'll just have to research to see which magazine pays the most and submit to them first!