Last year I made a quilt for my nephew and of course his little sister should get one too! I used the stitch and flip triangle technique from the book “Quilting modern” by Jacquie Gering and Katie Pederson. Each square got two triangles on opposite corners.
I started with the light grey background and used scraps for the triangles. When I ran out of the light grey I added the black and at some point also started to cut triangles from yardage, fat quarters and layer cakes because I wanted a different fabric for each triangle and not all of my scraps were large enough anymore. I even unpicked a couple of squares when I realised I had duplicates. When I ran out of black background I switched to neon green. I also made some pink squares but liked the overall look better without the pink. The blocks finish at 4 ¾’’.
The squares were rearranged on my design wall until I found a layout I liked and pieced together into the top. Then it took a very long time before I knew what I wanted to do with the back. For her brother I had included his name on the back and I thought it would be nice to also do that for this quilt but I just couldn’t decide on which fabrics to use. The solution came when I started to play with solids.
The batting is Hobbs Tuscany cotton wool, which remains my favourite. For the quilting I did a walking foot orange peel design that I found in Jacquie Gering’s book “Walk”. A book I can recommend to anyone who wants to get a bit more adventurous with their walking foot. To stabilize everything and get rid of most of the basting pins I first did some stitch in the ditch quilting using white Aurifil 50wt thread. For the orange peels I used 28wt Gutermann Sulky thread in 6 different colours. I only marked dots using a template and stitched from fabric intersection to dot to fabric intersection. This worked well and quilting went a lot quicker than I had expected. The curves aren’t exactly identical for every peel, but that’s ok. This curvy design adds a lot more to the quilt than a straight line cross hatch would have done.
The binding was the next hurdle. I always wonder how some people can already pick a binding fabric at the start of the project. I don’t even try anymore, probably because my quilts develop organically and I don’t always know at the start what it’ll look like in the end. A fabric that I think will work at the start nearly always doesn’t. Anyway, I thought I’d figured something out that would work, cut out strips from several solid fabrics but when I draped them around the quilt, it was just “meh”. Then I ordered some fabric but it turned out way too dark. However, it looked absolutely great with the top I had up on my design wall so unexpectedly I had suddenly solved another back problem. Still no binding for this quilt though. I proceeded by holding up lots and lots of different fabrics from my stash until I found the fabric that you now see. This is the aqua crosses fabric from the Safari life line from Stacy Iest Hsu. Only problem, I had maybe half a jelly roll strip left so that was not going to cut it. Luckily, I found a fabric store in the Netherlands that still had enough of this fabric in stock and all was well in the end. This fabric works with both front and back of the quilt.
In total I used 175 different fabrics in this quilt, 3, background fabrics, 160 triangles, 11 fabrics on the back and 1 binding. I think this is a record for me. I finished the quilt just in time to gift it on my nieces 1st birthday. If hope she’ll enjoy using it for a very long time.
That is an awesome quilt and I loved how you worked her name in!
Thank you!
It’s perfect! Similar to her brother’s but so not the same, and full of variety.
Thank you!
Wow — this is a real labour of love and a beautiful result. Well done!!
Thanks for the detailed account of your process and the useful tips you give.
I too sometimes spend the longest time choosing the binding for a quilt.
Thank you! I sometimes feel that I spend at least if not more time thinking about how to make something than actually sewing it.
Me too! The thinking part is important though
Certainly! I just wish I could think faster.
A lovely modern quilt that will most likely last your niece for years and years to come. I am envious of your lovely machine quilting – I can’t be trusted to do anything more than simple cross hatch or, if I’m feeling adventurous, wavy lines.
Thank you! If you can do wavy lines you can do this as well. It was really surprisingly easy. Just look at where you’re going not at the needle when moving the quilt through the machine.
Just came across this when checking out your blog for some ideas. We use the quilts all the time and I love both of them so much. They both have so many details I adore. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to like the back of a quilt best, but the colours on the back of Lette’s quilt always make me very happy.
PS. The new site looks awesome!
Thank you! You can consider it a double sided quilt with the pieced back and I love those colours too!