Inspiration
While shopping at
Modern Domestic, one of my the local quilt stores haunts, I came across this wonderful gauzey fabric:
I loved the fluorescent pop and paintbrush effect of the pattern. I had no idea what I was going to make with it, just that I needed to have some. I knew that I wanted it to be a quilt backing so I wasn't going to just get a 1/3 of a yard (my standard cut for "I love it but I don't know what I am going to do with it", because you can get a 10" square). Given that it wasn't an inexpensive fabric, I opted for one yard, knowing that I would be able to make a small, stroller sized quilt from that. I didn't want to take away from the lovely backing with a bunch of competing prints, so I proceeded to get a stack of solids that matched the colors in print to use in my quilt top. Part of my draw to this particular fabric was that I knew I had fluorescent yellow fabric at home just waiting for the right project to be showcased in.
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| It was suggested that I take a photo of the stack so I could reference the color names later. Glad I did! |
Decision Time
Unlike so many of my fabric stacks, this one did sit for too long before I was ready to start sewing it up. This meant that I was going to have to find a pattern so I could get going!
I grabbed a healthy number of my quilting books and the few magazines I have purchased and started combing through them.
I knew I had a winner when I saw this one:
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| Fresh Quilts. Fall/Winter 2014 |
However, there was a problem. It is a common problem when you don't buy fabric with a particular pattern in mind. This quilt was big, way too big for the one yard of backing that I had. Generally, I have the same response to this problem, scale the quilt down. And while this can be an easy task, it can also involve an immense amount of math. For this one I did a lot of maths and a little fudging :)
Wrestling
This little quilt fought me the whole way, from a tricky pattern to scale down to my color choices, it was rough going. First, I realized that for the pattern I was going to need another color in addition to what I had purchased. Instead of heading straight to the store, I looked through my stash of solids. This was a lot easier than it would have been in the past. Moving from my craft room, since it is now the nursery, into the dining room had the huge advantage of forcing me to sort through and organize many things. And guess what, I found something!
Then, (and I'm sorry that I don't have progress picks on this one) had decided to use this forest green fabric I had in my stash for my main color since I had a whole yard. It was on sale and a good color, so I bought a bunch. Somewhat unlike me, I decided that I trusted my instincts and just cut everything out without making any kind of test piece first. The result,? After sewing two rows together I HATED it. And not just my usual "I don't know if this is going to turn out" dislike, this was disgust. I was going to ruin my beautiful backing fabric with this atrocity.
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| So much wasted fabric! |
After being really annoyed with myself for one, wasting fabric and time and two, going against my normal cautious, methodical approach, I headed off to the fabric store to find a more suitable choice for my main color. I decided on the dark royalish blue, Mediterranean was the way to go. This time, I was not wrong. So I forged ahead.
The rows with just the rectangles went together very quickly. Then it was on to the geese, or half square triangles (HST), depending on how you look at it. And things got sticky again. Ah maths. In order for the HST to line up with the rectangles, they couldn't actually be square. I was pretty tired of math at this point, and decided to handle this in a lazy way. I would make HST triangles that would be tall enough and then I would cut the back of them so they would be the right width. Again, because it was too much math to come up with the exact size I needed for the height, I just over sized them a bit and planned on cutting them down. This turned out to be a very smart decision :)
I have never really trimmed anything while quilting before. It seemed tedious and unnecessary. If everything is cut the right size before you sew it together, why would you need to trim? Well, I am learning there are lots of reasons. First, your seam allowance is unlikely to be perfect. Second, and this is especially true with triangles and bias edges, things get all shifty and come out a bit funky shaped. So as I sewed together my trimmed and a bit hacked off "flying geese" together, I realized that this whole process had given me some wonderfully perfect points. Ah, the little things.
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| Half square flying geese with pretty points. |
The End is in Sight
At this point, pretty much everything went smoothly. It took me a bit to decide on quilting and thread colors but that is pretty par for the course. I also opted for some really awesome bamboo batting in this one. Again, because this is a pretty small quilt, I was willing to splurge on the expensive batting. The drape came out so nice on this quilt that there may be more bamboo batting in my future!
I am very proud of this little finish. One, it is for my boy and it was the first thing that I finished for him and two, it took so much persistence to get through this project. I stuck to my guns, didn't compromise and in the end, got exactly what I wanted. Always a great feeling!
