The front is obviously very basic patchwork. These are simple 8.5" squares made from some Kona Cotton solids (if you sew and quilt a lot a Kona color card is an amazing tool for picking out just the right color for your project) and a fat quarter bundle of Chirp! fabric by Katie Hennigar. I always take pictures of the layout of my quilts before I start to sew. Somehow it is just easier to see what would look better where when I see it on the computer screen instead of on the floor.
The back was a little more complicated. There was a really cute panel that came with the fat quarter bundle, but it was on a green background that seemed almost neon. It definitely didn't go with my quilt so I couldn't use it as is. After getting some input from a friend on what to do, I cut out the scenes from the panel, leaving a 1/4" seam allowance around each of them. Then I used some 2.5" strips of Kona Snow (white, but not bright white) to achieve the layout I wanted. At that point I still had to make the back of the quilt a tad bigger:
I decided to go with a thin brown border (the same brown from the patchwork on the front) and then a wider yellow border to finish things off. The small detail on the yellow border was the happy result of coming up just shy of enough yellow fabric to finish the whole thing off. One of my favorite quilters puts a similar detail into each of her bindings as a tag, and so I shamelessly stole her idea, mostly out of necessity.
Speaking of binding, normally I love to hand bind my quilts. I've found that it's a really soothing thing for me to sit and sew by hand, plus it helps keep me occupied while watching a movie on the couch (because I can't just sit and watch a movie). But being the procrastinator that I am I just did not have time to hand bind this, so I took a leap and did machine binding using this handy tutorial. I used invisible thread and I loved the finished look. Here's a picture of the folded quilt where you can see the binding on both the front and the back:
The front looks so professional (I'm not bragging about my skills here, it was really simple and a result of the tutorial!) and the back has some spots where the stitching wanders a bit, but it's invisible thread so it hardly shows up as a flaw. Plus it was so fast! I bound this quilt in probably a quarter of the time or less than it would take to do the same work by hand.
The quilting is an all-over meander that is really fun to do now that I have a sewing machine that can handle free-motion quilting (and that is a shout-out for my ultra-generous hubby who encourages me in my hobby by providing all the fun tools of the trade).
This was a really fun project, and if you're in SLO and in the know I can tell you that this quilt is for a Baby Beaver. :)
*Please excuse the quality of the photos in this post, I usually sew at night when the kids are sleeping, so the light is not really great!
