Last Dance with Diatom

We celebrated my mom's and My Guy's birthdays yesterday.  Mom's birthday was this last week and My Guy's was earlier this month.  My mom is big on celebrating birthday's and realized that she'd never done anything special for My Guy on his.  So this year she wanted to be sure we celebrated both.  We had a fun time, but it's the 4th weekend in a row that we've not been home. 

Even though we've been gone a lot, I put the last stitches in the binding for Diatom the day after we got back from vacation.  It took me a few days to get the final photographs. 

Diatom was Quilting Jetgirl's 2023 quilt along. The blocks are 24" finished. It was such fun to make. I fell in love with Yvonne's all blue demo version so stuck with the same color palette.  My version has thin sashing and a final border. It's one of my favorite finishes this year. 

Trudy did her magic with the quilting, a nice flowing vine motif. 

The backing is a dark blue design from Connecting Threads and it's bound in the same dark blue used on the front. 

This quilt is a wedding gift for a couple Grad Girl met at Oklahoma State.  The new wife is a fellow chemistry graduate student and the new husband is an architect, but he's also the Dungeon Master for the Dungeons and Dragons adventurers group that Grad Girl plays with.  The DM title is important as that's where the name of the finished quilt came from. 

Dancing Lights is a spell used in D&D to create torches to provide light. Grad Girl thought it worked pretty well for this quilt. The poem on the label is Dancing Lights by Mary K. Boye. I've only used the first verse, but it seemed very fitting for a newly married couple and still worked nicely with the D&D theme. 

Completion of Dancing Lights brings my UFO list down to 19, which is where I ended last year.  I'm hoping to finish at least one more quilt this year.  We'll see how that goes.  Linking up to Design Wall Monday and Patchwork & Quilts.