A commission and an interview

 I have a new commission which is great because I love commissions. It gives me the chance to work to a brief and collaborate with my client at the same time. In this case my clients are Michael and Claire who are friends of mine. Apparently they have a very, very ugly sofa they wish to cover up with something pretty. I suggested at first to buy a nice throw but they want a quilt because that also gives them a chance to snuggle up under.
Claire's brief was that she wanted to have a quilt that shows "shades of red ranging from raspberry to the deepest darkest cherry with some patterned fabric in between". Claire and Mica's style is veering towards the minimalist so I came up with this design:

Basically two curved parts in the top left and bottom right corner that are pieced from patterned and solid fabrics all in shades of red. Then one small pieced item in the middle and the entire thing is connected by large blocks in various shades of red solids.

This will challenge me in terms of curve sewing but also and here is the catch in terms of size. The quilt has to be 3.2 x 2.5 m that is 126 x 98 inches !
In other words a monster quilt. Has any of you ever attempted something as big as this ? The reason why it is has to be so big is that the ugly sofa is rather on the large side. Apparently nobody knows how it got into the living room....

I have shown Claire the design and she approves (phew !) and we also looked at patterned fabric and solids. I took along my Kona shade card which helped enormously.

And this is the fabric selection I am going to be using with 'Berry Red' (that is how I named the quilt).
To the right are a number of K. Fassett and Philip Jacobs prints amongst some others. I think I will also use the odd dark yellow or cream piece to accentuate. My hope is although this selection here looks quite intense and wild that the overall effect of the quilt is a lot calmer with some small bursts of excitement (ie. the corner sections) as the solid parts joining the two corners are rather on the large side due to its size. What do you think ? I would appreciate some advice and honest thoughts from you my wonderful readers.

Ahem...........................and here comes the bit about the interview. The lovely Rhonda from Quilter in the Gap asked me a while ago if I would agree to be interviewed and God only knows why but I agreed.
Rhonda did a great job putting a coherent story together from my garbled answers and she makes me look a lot cooler than I really am.

I just listened to it and I would have never imagined that it is so excruciating having to listen to someone speaking about me in such a complimentary way.

So if you want to hear a a bit about me then hop over to Rhonda and have a look and listen. She is a great story teller and has produced three podcasts so far that are fantastic to listen to. The best thing though is that there is lots of other stuff on the podcast, one of them is something about free-motion quilting and here experience on the longarm quilter.