The challenge was color. Bright color. I had the opportunity to stop by Hancocks of Paducah this week. There is a giant table of remnants. I pulled a bunch of them. Enough for two quilts. I started with a wild flowered print with lots of pink, turquoise and orange. I kept pulling fabrics from the giant stack that all worked. Lots of pink and turquoise. A few text prints in black and white and some Kaffe yardage for my collection. But there was also a pile orange and pink fabrics. I really loved the pink and turquoise. I was going to make a pink and turquoise quilt. But I knew that if I left the oranges on the table, I would dream about them and I would never find them again and it would be yet another quilt that got away. Since it was the remnant table, I bought them all.
Then I started on the quilt. The orange quilt. Not the pink and turquoise quilt. That one will wait for another day.
I knew I needed a simple design for this project so I reverted to my very first go to quilt pattern. The one I learned from my grandmother. Diagonal blocks. And if you don't have enough of one fabric them grab the closest thing and start filling in. That is what happened with the black print I put in to give some contrast to the colors.
Now this is the quilt pattern I, we, made many times when my babies were babies. We being my husband and I. He would cut all the fabric and I would sew. We invented our own plan for strip piecing in the days before youtube when you read books or learned at your LQS if you even knew what that was, which I didn't when I started. I just looked at the quilts Grandma made and went from there. After making a quilt by cutting up individual blocks (poorly) and sewing them together crookedly, we decided there had to be a better way.
Our plan basically amounts to sewing strips, cutting them in half, sewing and cutting until we end up with one long strip of blocks. Then we take a picture of the rolled up 'quilt', giggle and start unpicking at the appropriate intervals. Ayup. There is an entire quilt in there.
After that it is a matter of sewing the strips together and finishing your quilt. Easy. Peasy. Boy did we think we were clever. Soon we learned that there were whole books on strip piecing and quilt design. But this works for us and we revert to it when we need a quilt in a hurry.
Having brought home the stack of fabric and explaining my plan to the Mr, he wasn't to be stopped on helping. So I am probably disqualified this week because he did his usual job of cutting the fabric for me. It has been awhile since we worked together on a quilt so it was great fun to be doing it.
Thus you have the Bright Quilt. The back is particularly blinding as it is a black and white zig zag. The quilt insisted on it and the ladies at the LQS (I know about these now) agreed with the quilt. Which was really unkind of them as the print is pretty blinding up close and personal. I figured it would be ok because it would be upside down when I basted it and upside down when I quilted it. However, it was face front when stitching the binding. Fortunately that is done!
This is the final, done, indoor at night picture to show that in spite of being blinded by the backing, I was able to get the final edge stitched up. It was machine quilted with a large window pane design using the walking foot. Machine bound and hand stitched. The quilt measures 44 x 72 inches.
This was done in response to the Project Quilting prompt created by Trish Franklin, the evil challenge maker for Kim Lapacek's Project quilting. Check it out on her blog persimon dreams.
