Snug Harbor Quilts: May 2014

Happy 85th Birthday to my mother! This has been a cold, cold winter (the ice is now gone, but this picture was taken only a week ago). My mom loves yellows and blues, and so for her birthday I made her a cozy string quilt in her favorite colors.

I wanted to use fabrics from my stash, and found so very many blues and yellows. I kept the blues to one basic shade, and then used many gold and yellow fabrics. I used a Kona Cotton in Copen as the one solid. Despite being limited to blues and golds, I ended up using 24 different fabrics for this quilt. I started by cutting my fabric into 2 1/2 in strips of various lengths.

For piecing the quilt, I cut scrap paper into 8 1/2 inch squares, and used my 1/4 ruler (I am not sure of the real name) to draw the center diagonal lines. I was using the blue solid for each center.

With the blue in place, I started sewing on the strips, picking mostly at random, but trying not to use the same fabric twice in a block. These blocks come together quickly and easily.

Blocks without the final little corner piece.

The pile of blocks being used by Chester as a little booster as he checks out the book on top of the bookshelf.

The back of the finished block.

Trimming off the excess fabric

The trimmed blocks

I love putting the blocks together to start to see the pattern emerge!

I am never sure whether to sew the blocks together with or without the paper. In this case, I removed the paper first. This makes it easier to sew, but the blocks do tend to stretch out of shape a bit. In either case, little bits of paper and usually left behind.

I used tweezers to remove the little paper bits before putting the quilt sandwich together.

I made a string quilt last year with more blocks that had no border, but I decided this quilt needed to be just a bit bigger. I still had some yellow fabric left over from another yellow quilt, and decided to use that for the border as well.

It took me a while to decide upon a quilting pattern, and I decided to use a walking foot to do a lattice design, but rather than straight lines, I used a zig zag setting on my machine to make for a little different design. I wanted to make sure the lines started out straight on the border fabric, and so I used a disappearing ink pen to draw the starter lines.

The backing (pre-washing) shows the quilting more clearly than the front of the quilt.

Since the strips were the same width, I quilted down the middle of each strip. I also did a straight stitch in the ditch around the center solid blue lines, and the border, just for a little more definition. This was a very forgiving quilt design!

A close up of the quilting on the front.

I still had some stars left over from the big star stash that I used for the other yellow quilt. I used some of those stars, some IKEA number fabric (I didn't have enough for the whole back) and some of the border fabric to create the backing.