Smocking Quilt Finished: Nestling

Update:  I'm entering this quilt in the Pantone Color of the Year Quilt challenge, because I love the bright purple, quite close to this year's ultraviolet, you get in this quilt where the underlying darker purple is overlaid with pink and turquoise thread in quilting.  You should check out the entries,  and thanks to No Hats in the House and Bryan House Quilts for hosting.

On Monday I shared the first steps of my new "fabric manipulation" quilt, and now I'm back to share the final thing.  The last we saw, it had been painted, quilted, and stitched along the grid so that the back side looked like a big mess.

But! It really does work.  Here's the final quilt from the front:

Nestling, c. Shannon Conley, 2018

I love the way it turned out.  To me it feels like a quilters interpretation of the garter stitch from knitting, or a bunch of little squids all nestled together.  I decided to call it Nestling, because of how nestled together each element is with its neighbors.  Of course a nestling is also a baby bird, so maybe they aren't squid heads but baby bird beaks?  Or very well-organized bird nests?  Who knows!  The quilt didn't fold quite as well as a single piece of fabric would have, but did come out quite a bit better than I expected.  I'm super excited to try some more like this using different patterns.