Finished Quilt for The Middle

Can I just start off by saying that I am so glad I finally finished this quilt?! I started this one two years ago. Normally, I'd say that's okay, but for this quilt it was way too long. A lot can happen in two years. The Middle has changed a lot; going from two to four (almost five) will do that. Thankfully, though, she still likes how her quilt turned out and I like that I could finally check it off my list.



When I first drafted this quilt design, I had just finished a baby quilt using Elizabeth Hartman's Mixtape pattern for a friend. I had also just made Cherie's bee block using the Fat Cat dresden ruler. When I asked The Middle her opinion about her quilt, she said she wanted flowers. She chose this stack of Rainy Days and Mondays fabric that I'd had for a while and I thought the dresdens would make cute quasi flowers/umbrella tops. I love using graph paper to plan out new quilt ideas - it takes me back to my days of hand-drafting floor plans in my interior design classes - so when I merged these two ideas together, this is what I came up with.

The dresdens are machine appliqued onto Kona white. The sashing is a quilter's solid medium gray that I picked up from Joann's. The binding is the pink/red/green raindrop print from the Rainy Days and Mondays line, and the backing is just a solid pink flat sheet that I got from Target. I quilted the entire quilt in meandering loops. The quilt is a twin size, measuring 72" x 90" before washing.

Quilt Tops a Long Time in the Works

In 2012, I jumped on the Granny Squares bandwagon. I love the quilts that came out of that craze and didn't have the self control to not start my own. I pulled out my scraps and cut squares for several blocks. But, like a lot of things on my sewing plate, I let this one sit for a while. Once I pieced all the blocks, I didn't like the traditional layout, I think because of the scraps I had used. I played around with them and decided to mimic the Granny Square block itself.



I plan to add another white border to make it bigger so it's more useful for us, but thought I'd post about it since it's been in the works for so long. I have eight more blocks that I'll be piecing into a simple baby quilt too.

This next quilt top is one that I started way back when The Middle was two and I was pregnant with the baby. Now she's almost five. She picked the fabrics (Rainy Days and Mondays by Melimba and Beccabury for Riley Blake) and wanted the "flowers" (dresdens) so this is the design I came up with. I combined Elizabeth Hartman's Mixtape pattern with the fat cat dresden plates and sashed the blocks in a medium gray. Since this quilt top is intended for her bed, I'll probably just buy a flat sheet (in pink per The Middle's request) for the backing, and be done with it.

Finally some quilty sewing!

After Christmas, I was so excited to get started on some new projects. You might say I was a little impatient. I felt a little scatterbrained at first trying to decide what new project to start, so I ended up starting three.

One of my quilt plans for 2011 is to make a new quilt for my bed. The mister and I decided to go with the All Star 2 line. My plan is to make square-in-square blocks. Here are the first two.





I'm not sure what the final size blocks will be. These are about 12 inches, but I'm just kind of winging this one. The finished quilt needs to fit our queen-sized bed so I might finish the blocks at around 16 inches. We'll see how they turn out.

I got a baby shower invite in the mail yesterday, so after working on the two blocks last night, I started a quilt top for the baby-to-be. I tried out Oh Fransson's Mixtape pattern, but made a few modifications to speed up the process. I'll talk about this more later as I work on the quilt (it's due by next Friday), but I left out the sashing and I think it came together nicely.



Finally, I decided to start on a Kitchen Windows quilt from Elizabeth Hartman's book, The Practical Guide to Patchwork, using two of the colorways from Far Far Away 2. I wasn't quite sure what fabric to use as the "windows." I initially went with Kona Green Grass to create a lot of contrast between the windows and the background. But, the more I looked at the fabric, I didn't like how the color changed depending on the light. In natural light, the fabric matched the colors in FFA2 nicely, but in florescent light, it totally clashed.



The problem with going with a neutral, though, is that I'm worried the quilt will just get muddled.



Then I had the thought that if I go with the green window sashing, the green might overpower the FFA2 fabrics and stand out more than anything else. I kind of want the FFA2 fabric to be the star of the quilt, so I'm torn.

Any suggestions?