This is the third in a series.
I made the first in 2007, and the second some time between then an now. I’ve been appliqué ing the circles down for a few years and finished a few weeks ago. It’s not pieced but seeing this quilt on my design wall makes me one happy mama.
My cousin and his wife had Sweet Pea 22 hours before Q Man was born. 22 hours! How crazy is that?! I mean, really?
Of course I had to make a quilt.
This quilt was so fun and easy to make. I fussy cut the center squares from a variety of fun fabrics then bordered each with a solid reading batik. I love it! I did some great quilting in the center of the squares, too. It was so much fun to do the free motion quilting in the center of each block.
Sadly, I’ve had the quilt pieced and quilted for ages but just hadn’t bound it. Partially because I was being lazy and didn’t want to make the binding and partially because I wasn’t sold on any particular fabric for the binding. Originally I planned to use the black and white flower print that I’d used for the inner border. Then I decided I didn’t like it.
I’m trying to finish up projects now that I’ve found balance in my life and make time to sew. Since this partially finished quilt was in my sewing room for a year (gasp!) I decided I needed to just get it finished. I was digging through my binding scraps (yes, I keep all the little parts of binding if I have some remaining so I can use it on other projects or piece several bindings together for quilts, or…. you get the idea). Anyhow, I ran across this stripe that, ironically, I used as the binding for a baby quilt for another cousins kid born a few months before Q Man. Perfect! I just love striped bindings.
Sweet Pea’s Mamas favorite color is purple so I put this funky purple-ish Kaffe on the back for her. Okay, I had enough fabric in my stash, too. But it soooo screams of her Mama.
I’m super pleased and hope that Sweet Pea will treasure this for years!
I’ve made many quilts with strips and scraps and scraps of strips. It goes without saying that the goal is to use some of the fabric in my stash and create a beautiful quilt.
I began this quilt about a year ago.
The quilt was achieving the look I wanted – colors bleeding into one another to form an asymmetrical rainbow – and I had great plans! But the corners were very thick with all those pieced parts and since I didn’t paper piece the blocks I had some wave in the quilt. But mostly the corners were making me crazy! They were unruly. I was starting to dread the entire project, including the quilting, and I was nowhere near quilting the darn thing.
So I put the quilt and all the extraneous parts away in a colorful little box.
Except for a few small pieces that taunted me for a year.
Then a few weeks ago I took a small square of strip pieced pink fabric and put a yellow border on it.
I liked the results but wasn’t quite sure what to do or where to go so I just looked at the block for a few weeks.
Then! An a-ha moment! What if I take apart my “rainbow” quilt and border each square in a complimentary color? Armed with my seam ripper at a neighborhood meeting and a completely uncomfortable chair, my quilt was deconstructed into all these little parts.
I ironed all the blocks and starting sewing borders on my “new” project. Then I decided that a complimentary border was too orderly for me, so I mixed them up to get this.
I bordered three blocks, put them on the design wall but wasn’t happy with how my quilt looked.
I was, once again, a bit frustrated…then I looked at the rather large pile of red squares I’d made and put them on my wall. I didn’t want to make more blocks. So far I have this and I really like it. I’m pondering a golden yellow sashing with red cornerstones but really I haven’t settled on anything yet.
I think it’ll look good. What do you think?