At the top I embroidered a quote from The Princess Bride, which Westley says to Buttercup: “My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches”. This is pretty seminal to my marriage.

I hand-pieced the curved flag-shaped pieces to create the ocean, and then machine stitched the columns together. For the quilting, the wave shape of the water goes from really curly at the top to a gentle wave at the bottom.  I pebbled the sand at the bottom, and used a fish scale pattern on the grey border.

Here’s some of the details:

• The brain coral I created using Texture Magic and some hotfix crystals.
• The seaweed I created using Ultra Heat n Bond (the red package) to bond two charm squares together. I then cut out the various seaweed shapes and loosely stitched them down to the quilt top. With the UHnB, you can then go in with a curling iron or flat iron and reheat the pieces to shape them into curls or waves and they will stay permanently in that shape.
• The octopus is slightly stuffed at the top and the legs are done using the same UHnB technique.

• These sequin fish are my favorite bits - the sequins are stitched on by hand.
• That little clam on the bottom has a pearl button on the inside.
• The red anemone is hand-ruched, created from a couple shades of red in the charm pack.

• The jelly fish are the first things I created.  I had the idea to sandwich some buttons under iron-on vinyl to get the translucent effect jellyfish have, and then used the UHnB method to create the dimensional tentacles.
• The Selvedge Fish were the last thing I create after looking at all these trimmed edges I had - the pinked edges of the charm pack reminded me of fish scales.

Most of my guildmates had no clue which quilt was mine (we did a guessing game at the show to match up who made which quilt).  I was flattered that a lot people thought I made the Judge’s Choice quilt, but since I’m usually not a fan of “gluing sh*t on quilts”, I apparently threw a lot of people off the scent with my entry.