Last year I participated in the first Dutch MQG round robin. The theme was connection and I almost immediately thought of roads. Roads connect A and B, but the journey to reach your destination also matters. So, I thought it would be fun to make a landscape quilt that contained roads and things that you drive past as you make a road trip.

In groups of 5 or 6 quilters we made grid-based quilts. Each quilter started with six 9” blocks that were placed in a 5×6 grid. The blocks were then sent to the next person who also prepared 6 blocks and decided where her blocks should go in the grid. After 30 blocks were completed, the quilt came back to the first person. The blocks were then sewed into a quilt top and quilted.

My group made quite diverse quilts and I think mine turned out very well! There is a fun variety of fabrics and blocks. Since the front is quite busy, I kept the back simple and combined only two blue fabrics.

Finishing my Road Trip

I quilted with my walking foot and first did some stitch in the ditch quilting to secure the blocks. Then I went wild with what I call “walking foot improv”. For each block I just made the quilting design up as I went along. No marking, just stitching. This involved numerous turns, thread changes and burying of threads. I love how it looks, but I think my next quilt will be a simple grid because it took forever.

For the binding I chose a green fabric that I think works well with the other greens in the quilt. Except for a small piece on the right side of the quilt for which I used a remnant of one of my favourite binding fabrics (from the Blueberry Park collection by Karen Lewis).

I’ve given most of the quilts that I’ve made away but Road Trip stays on our couch. It looks great with the green wall in our living room. It is also really nice to have a larger quilt to cover my legs as the other quilt that we keep on our couch is quite a bit smaller!

This round robin was a lot of fun to participate in. I decided to skip this year’s edition because I already have too much going on right now, but I’ll definitely join again another time!