L is for...

{After posting this, I was really unhappy with the photos. 
For better pics, check out this post.}

My sister's birthday was recently and we get to celebrate with her tomorrow because she's out visiting from Chicago. We are all so excited to see her tomorrow and can't wait to give her this quilt! A couple months back, I was trying to figure out what to do for her birthday and I started thinking...she lives in and loves Chicago, I love to quilt...what can I do with this? I tried googling city-inspired quilts and found some really cool ideas (like this, this and this) but none of them were exactly what I wanted.  And so I looked up the transit map for the L (the train system in Chicago), which looks like this (and can be found here)...

Then I got myself a scrap of Kona muslin, a hoop, and some embroidery floss to work on this...

and this...

(you might remember them from this post).

 After doing some embroidery, I made it into a quilt!

detail of the front

The colored routes and Lake Michigan shoreline are to scale, but I used some artistic license with the city grid to make it what I wanted.

back
(taken on vacation in the mountains above Santa Cruz, because that's where I finally finished it...)

And she and her new husband live right where the heart is.

Happy Birthday to my amazing little sister! 

Fingers crossed she loves the quilt!

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