The Ying Yang

It’s my first wedding anniversary today and I can’t even believe it’s been a year already…feels like only few months ago that I was stressing about wedding plans and all that. Anyway, it’s been a journey but I’m glad for this new phase of my life. You know there has to be a Quilt involved somewhere in this story right…Yes of course there is but before I show you, here is a brief background!

My husband likes, more like loves the “YING YANG” symbol and the whole concept dunno why.  For as long as I’ve known him he’s had this bracelet with the Ying Yang symbol all over it but he recently lost it. He has been asking me to make him something with Ying Yang and particularly mentioned an appliqued T-shirt but I wasn’t feeling that. However, anniversary was coming up so perfect excuse to make my him something, naturally, I decided on a Ying Yang inspired mini.

I figured I’d make a mini wall hanging or another throw pillow to replace the one I made for him earlier in the year, I didn’t do any post on that though I should have so here is a another story – He wanted one in grey to match his car seat but he insisted he doesn’t want to stress me so nothing fancy. I had this grey fabric that was perfect for the project and I played around with free motion quilting design to make a whole cloth one…we were happy with the result!  OK I have digressed so far, back to my Ying Yang inspired Quilt. The keyword here is “inspired” which means I didn’t want to be literal in my interpretation of the symbol so no applique of the symbol but I’ll stick with the black and white theme.

I printed a copy of the Ying Yang symbol off the internet for reference but on getting home I couldn’t resist playing around with the symbol and here is what I came up with, this appliqued mini finished at 15”. Good thing I had some fabrics in black and white just hibernating in my stash. I tried spiral quilting with my walking foot on this one and I loved it! Now I feel like I’ll quilt everything in spiral until I get bored. Oh almost forgot, I tried trapunto too – I will  do a step by step post as soon as I can.

 

Now for the actual Quilt I wanted to make off the color inspiration, I chose to do an over sized HST at 20” to mimic the separation between the black and white just like the Ying Yang symbol. I also wanted to have it read Happy Anniversary and included the heart because the black side was looking rather blank. I wanted a raw edge applique but without all the fraying and I got a pinking shears like forever ago that I never really used it so it came out to play. Plus I like the decorative effect it added to the alphabets. For the Quilting, I free motion quilted pebbles on the black half and stippled on the white half. I totally intended to do pebbles all over but it was taking forever and I had little time to spare but regardless I must say I am happy with the result.

What’d you think? I should blog about my quilts more often I think…

Sola 🙂