Bloggers' Quilt Festival
If you've not heard of the Bloggers' Quilt Festival, it's a bi-annual showcase of quilting bloggers' best work. I'm going to bore you all to death by entering my very first show quilt that you've seen a million times in various stages of completion- unless you're new here, in which case this post is for you.
Penny and Fletcher was my first ever applique quilt and my first ever art quilt, and I made it in the early summer, finishing up in the middle of July. I got drawn in by the idea of making a photo into a quilt and could think of no better subjects than my dogs. Penny passed away a couple of years ago, this photo was taken in her last few weeks. 
The quilt was made by ironing freezer paper pieces of my big blown up picture onto fabrics, snipping them, gluesticking the raw edges under and appliqueing them together onto the background fabric. I loved the gluing process as it meant patchwork without the sewing machine. This side of things took me a month or so, I then left the quilting part for a couple of weeks while I finished a quilt for my sister.
The quilting was done by machine and I wanted it to replicate the knap of the fur, the bobbled on their noses and the lines in the mattress so I did a bit of thread sketching. OK a lot of thread sketching, it took me a couple of weeks of dedicated work to get it finished. I even hid "Penny & Fletcher" in the swirls at the top in the white area. I touched up the shadows and dark details with some fabric paint and set it. Then it was ready!
It now hangs on the wall above our bed.