All the babies I plan to make quilts for seem to arrive early… this little man was 6 weeks early, so I’m not feeling too bad that this quilt was not done until after he was born. It’ll be a homecoming quilt.
This quilt was inspired by the Summer Breeze Quilt in Joelle Hoverson’s Last-Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts. I didn’t follow the pattern – but just looked at the picture and decided I wanted to do a stacked coin-type quilt which was five columns wide and where the “sashing” (if you can really call it that) was a pale aqua. This quilt looks prettier in person, I assure you. At mid-day it was hard to get a shot that wasn’t extremely contrasted like this.
I had already decided I was going to use my Alexander Henry Smoking Owls print as the feature for this quilt, and it seemed all the more perfect when I found out his name was Grayson! (Because the fabric is gray… in case that isn’t as obvious as I initially thought.)
The other fabrics I used in the stacked coin columns were: another Alexander Henry print called June something, and then a few Denyse Schmidt fabrics – I think one is from Greenfield Hill and one from the Hope Valley Collection. There’s also a tiny bit of some AMH Loulouthi in there, as well as some other solid scraps. The polka dot sashing is from Sarah Jane Wright’s Children at Play.
The back bicycle print was from my local store, and I’m not sure what it was. The other back blue accent fabric and binding where from Denyse Schmidt’s collection for Joann’s. They don’t ship to Canada sadly, but I have had good luck with a US mail forwarding system recently.
This was my first attempt at sort of improvisational quilting, and I enjoyed it. The whole thing went together very quickly.
I just did some kind of big swirls for the quilting. I still need to work on my machine quilting skills – that is, the process of actually sewing through the whole quilt. The stitch length is kind of all over the map. But I try not to beat myself up about that, since now that my Rainbow Quilt is on the bed, I have never once looked at or been bothered by the uneven stitch size on that quilt. I’m fairly sure the recipient won’t either. And I’ve got to just keep practising. I am thinking of taking a course in this at a quilting shop in the city.
