eleuthera ... a remembrance

My cousin spent five years teaching on the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. She is done teaching there, and my aunt is done with her special quilt.
Isn't this amazing!!!????!!!!My aunt spent years gathering specialty fabrics with shells and fish on them. She used a trapunto style of quilting when she put them on. Do you see the eel and the sea star? Did you notice all the coral that she machine quilted in there?
Do you see the octopus swimming by (in the quilting)?
The raw edge technique was used for a lot of the coral... and variegated thread accentuated it. The black coral was a circle, and the spikes were all stitched in.
She attached a few buttons here and there - a turtle was peeking out in this corner!
Isn't this a gorgeous jellyfish?!
See the little flippers swimming along the ocean bottom?
There's even more details that are too numerous to mention. My cousin said she feels like it's a fun game to play - see what else I can find that mom hid in the quilt for me.
What an amazing gift, eh? Leave her some comments & I'll be sure to pass them along!

(I saw my cousin this weekend & took the pictures then. Now it's a day later and as I'm writing this, I realize I don't even know all the names of everything that she was pointing out, and there's so many more details that I probably should have included. Seriously, a stunning quilt!)