Quiltingboard Forums - Definitely NOT your great grandmother's quilting

Loving Izabella (April) sent me a quilt she made for her DH. It has tons of significance. In addition to the quilt she emailed me pictures of her husbands tattoos. One tattoo was an Ankh with angel wings and the other was the grim reaper (Death) peeking over a chess board getting ready to move a piece. April explained to me that her DH philsophy of life is we are all playing a game of chess with death. One day death checkmates us. April asked if I could quilt these designs in her quilt and elaborate on the theme of "life is a game of chess with Death". So we emailed back and forth and I sent her some ideas and sketches and have been working on this for the past several weeks.

I say if I can draw it I can quilt it. This quilt totally stretched those boundaries for me. I am almost all the way done but had some great lighting conditions in my quilt room and thought April might also like a little sneak peek. The quilt pattern is BQ (big quilt). I used red and white Glide thread. This is free hand quilted on my Innova but I did mark the quilt siginificantly before loading it. I also did some curved and straight ruler work. There are two layers of batting. One cotton and one poly.

Here is the Grim reaper tattoo quilted front and back.
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Here is one of the winged Ankhs. There are 4 of them quilted on the quilt. Each one has wording. This one says "love"
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This was one of my ideas, Death's bony hand knocking over a king front and back

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Then I quilted in different chessmen and hourglasses. Here are some of the chess pieces front and back

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