the one {just} 7 months late

My lovely sister had her round-number birthday in June last year and I meant to celebrate it with a very special quilt for her.
As you can imagine, special quilts often mean lots of different ideas considered, rejected, deemed not good enough, reworked, judged too complicated to finish in some reasonable time... you get the idea. In the end instead of inventing something new, I settled for something I wanted to try for some time - big, machine-pieced clamshells, like the one made by Latifah.
As I love quilt maths and figuring layouts/patterns on my own (and also, as I wanted clams that would be 10" (25,4 cm) wide), I drafted and printed my own clamshell template.
And then I started sewing:

So, that was the quilt top sorted, and even with my slow no-pins curve piecing it came together quite quickly, but then followed another long period of choosing the perfect backing, which ended only when I saw this and this. I'm not so much into hearts on quilts, but I just couldn't resist this one.

And finally, "only" 7 months after my sister's birthday, the quilt was finished.

It is lightly quilted following the outlines of the clams, with some shoots in light green thread on a few green clams

and some not-quite-lillies-of-the-valley in white thread on some white clams.

I have to say I'm really happy with it and the fact that my sister likes it makes me even more happy.