My best friend who is also named Mary loves Tree of Life art. She ordered a Tree of Life panel from the ModernQuilter Etsy shop that she wanted to use as the center for a quilt for her new bed. We both recently treated ourselves to very comfortable adjustable beds. Mine is so tall that I keep a little step under the bed for a boost to get in bed! Mary and I decided to surround the panel with borders made from varying lengths of 2.5″ strips of grunge fabrics separated by thin strips of black. These grunge borders were then interspersed with solid Kona black borders mimicking the stained glass look of the panel. The finished quilt is 69″ x 77″, and below is a photo of the quilt front we took this cold, overcast morning, which I told Mary was perfect for quilt photography!

I knew I wanted to piece the back but wasn’t feeling particularly inspired until I searched Etsy again for Tree of Life panels and found a really cool Gustav Klimt Symbolist Painting panel at the Fieldsfabric Etsy shop. Later that morning I was on Pinterest, and Carolyn Friedlander’s Olive pattern showed up in my feed, and we decided that using five Olive blocks along with the panel and A LOT of Kona black fabric would work nicely for the quilt back. I’ll tell you a secret–the quilt back is actually more to my taste than the quilt front! I decided not to label this quilt so it could be easily used as a two-sided quilt.

The quilting was done by Cara of Sew Colorado Quilting. We chose the simple edge-to-edge Creeping Fig quilting motif in the Glide Vintage thread. Here is a close-up of the quilting that shows off the pretty gold fig leaves that absolutely shine in all that Kona black fabric.

Linking up to Sew Preeti Quilts: TGIFF.