A Big Green Quilt
A Big Green Quilt, 108" square
I have a particular cabinet in my sewing room where I store hand dyed fabrics that are about fat quarter size. They aren't big enough to plan a project around but too big to be considered scraps. Periodically I try (unsuccessfully) to empty one of the drawers. I started with a king size Fractured quilt. Photos of that one seem to have been lost on my old blog but I have Fractured Fragments made with the scraps. Those quilts put a sizeable dent in my purple and yellow drawers. Next I moved on to the brown drawer and made Lost My Marbles, one of my all-time favorite quilts. This year I decided to tackle the green drawer. I didn't have a particular plan or destination in mind when I started this quilt.
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I just found a pattern in my favorite quilt book, Colorful Quilts for Fabric Lovers and started cutting frames from any green in the book. For the windows I used my "waste" fabric that are created from my gradient dyeing process. I made a few of the blocks, put them on the design wall and didn't like them at all. But I showed a photo to my college roommate and she fell in love with it. Her maiden name was Kelly so she loves green. With a destination in mind I knew that I had to make it king size.
Each 12" block has 2 6" x 12" sub-units. It was a lot of fun to match up frames to windows and the sewing was easy. There was so much going on in the quilt that I had to brings some order to it and I did that by arranging the blocks based on the value of the green frames: light blocks in the center transition to the very dark blocks in the corners.
Quilting wasn't going to show and I knew that she wanted it soft for a bed quilt so I used a thin batting and very large free-hand spiral motif.
Each 12" block has 2 6" x 12" sub-units. It was a lot of fun to match up frames to windows and the sewing was easy. There was so much going on in the quilt that I had to brings some order to it and I did that by arranging the blocks based on the value of the green frames: light blocks in the center transition to the very dark blocks in the corners.
Quilting wasn't going to show and I knew that she wanted it soft for a bed quilt so I used a thin batting and very large free-hand spiral motif.
Even with the top done, this wasn't one of my favorite quilts so I wanted to make the back special in case they weren't totally happy with the front. This is an ice dyed mandala on a 120" square piece of fabric. The quilt finishes at 108" square.
I never could come up with a clever name so I named it want I called it while I was making it.
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She sent me these photos about 15 minutes after I delivered the quilt and, now that it's on the bed, I love it! Most important, she loves it too.