Ready for a beach party?

A final effort - and the appliqué is finished. It was a long and sometimes tedious journey for me, and I'm not quite pleased with how it is turning out, but I'm ready for the next step now.

I have already shown some of the making process here.

It's intended for the "On the beach" challenge at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. Don't know about you, but every time I come to the beach, this is the scene I get to see)))

I wanted it to be a bright fun piece with a pattern emerging from the repetition of simple shapes in a gradation of colors - two-way gradation, actually.  It's 1.1 m squared, so the pieces are not too small to be comfortable for hand appliqué, although some legs, tails and tentacles were tricky for me (I know there are people out there who can handle the tiniest of pieces with sharp points, but I'm not there yet).

Originally I intended to use really dark background, possibly black, but when I saw this fabric at the Knitting and Stitching Show, it really reminded me of shallow sea water rippling in the sun, so I decided to use it. However much I love it, it's still a bit too light in value and it plays down the contrast between the background and the appliqué, to the point where the starfish are almost the same value as the background (I wasn't able to find any other fabric for them, all the others seemed either too dark, or too light or had too much grey or blue in them). My only hope is that the quilting will make the background a bit darker.

Although it's about time to finish it and I already have a quilting idea in my mind, I intend to get a couple of days off from it, to look at it on the wall to decide what binding to use, besides, I'm still not sure about the corners, probably they need filling in.

Here are some close-ups of the fun on the beach:

I like how this central shape is formed with two slightly different types of seahorse tails.

I put together the pattern basing just on the way the shapes look, and only when I finished the appliqué did I realize that turtles actually feed on jellyfish in nature, and these ones seem to swim rather avidly towards their prey))

Crabs were the most pain in the neck with their ten legs, thankfully there were only three of them)) In the end, I think they are my favorites, as these fabrics really kind of resemble the real crab texture and color (considering there are lots of different crab species, they surely resemble at least one of those;))

They seem to be directing a choir or an orchestra:

Which reminds me of:

Hope it puts you into the mood for some summer fun!

Linking up to Tweety Loves Quilting, Let's Bee Social at Sew fresh Quilts, Fabric Tuesday at Quilt Story and Linky Tuesday at Freemotion by the river - do hop by and share in all the creative fun other people are having.