A year ago, my favorite online group started a Block of the Month. I posted about it last August and have been keeping up posting the individual blocks in there ever since. (You can read about it if you want and can see the pictures here: http://clkinmd.blogspot.com/2012/08/getting-back-to-sewing.html. I ended up having two knee replacements during this project. One in July and another in January.
The project was designed as a mystery, which means we had no clue what the design was going to end up as, we had to just follow along and hope for the best. Which I did faithfully for a year. I had to take time off after each surgery and it took a little while to get back in the swing of things, but I was so excited about this project and the fabric I had chosen, I got right back at it as soon as I could.
When Carol Doak first started this BOM, she designed it as a two-color quilt. I was a little skeptical about that, as two colors are often boring. Some others in the group added a zinger color or just used multi-color prints, and some even made it scrappy using every color under the sun, but I decided that Carol often has a reason for her choices, and she’s been designing quilts for years, so it’s best to listen to her. But I still thought two colors was going to be boring, so rather than using more than two colors, I decided to stick with the two color quilt, but add the zinger in the borders.
I found this Northcott Kaleidoscope line of fabric that really seemed to fit the bill. But of course I couldn’t follow her directions exactly so rather than use the layout she designed, I decided to do a little more and surround more of the pretty blocks with star points. And then it looked unfinished so I added reverse star points to make some of the blocks look like square in a square block. All those changes made me need more fabric than originally planned and I ran out when all I needed was 16 pieces of 4 x 4 inch squares. I looked all over and finally found it in an online store. I even got fabric for the backing, I wasn’t sure in the beginning what I was going to do, but since the fabric was expensive and I hate to use expensive fabric on the backing, I didn’t buy any, figured I’d find something on sale later. But the quilt looks so cool, I decided to go ahead and spend the money for the expensive backing. I decided very early into the process to quilt it with an all-over daisy design. I used a design by Anne Bright called Daisies and Loops.
I had a hard time deciding what fabric to use for the binding. Pink would look good on the front but bad on the back. Green would be best, but very boring. I could use the print, but it's so big I was afraid it would look funny. So I tried out a new technique some fellow quilters told me about. Below is a close up showing 3 layers of the binding because the quilt is folded. Two show the front which has the pink flange and the center layer is what the back looks like. All green. You can see my stitch line which should be right on the edge of the binding. I’m really happy with the end result.
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