Latest Quilt

Here is my latest quilt made for a nephew, M, who was due in late September but decided to come a little early.  One of the bonuses of coming early was I knew what his name was before I was done with the quilt and could applique his name on the quilt.

For this quilt I wanted to do an argyle pattern but I didn't want to figure out how to deal with non-right angle diamonds so I went with a modified argyle where I just used rotated squares quilted through the middle.

Putting the squares on their sides made figuring out the size the squares needed to be difficult. I got out some graph paper and mapped out the quilt and tried to figure out my measurements there but, apparently, that didn't work out very well because all my squares are smaller than they should have been. The original plan was to only have the argyle pattern with the orange border but, since my squares were too small, I ended up having to add the blue border (good thing I accidentally bought too much fabric). However, the blue border came in handy when trying to figure out how to do the quilting around the name applique - so I guess it all worked out in the end.


With this quilt I also did triangles for the first time.  I didn't have a triangle tool and I didn't want to pull trigonometry out of my head so I kind of winged the first few by taking cut squares and trimming them into a triangle where I thought they needed to be trimmed. That actually worked beautifully. Some of the triangles were a little big (maybe 1/8 - 1/4 of an inch too long) but that was fine because the excess was just cut off or sewn into the seam.

Another first with this quilt was having a border on both the front and the back - having both orange borders was planned from the beginning.  This made lining up the two sides and the batting a little more time consuming because I wanted to make sure the borders were nearly perfectly lined up so that the quilting would look good. It took extra time but it wasn't difficult (because everything was measured carefully) and I probably wouldn't hesitate too much to do something like that again.

Overall, I think the quilt turned out really cute. I like the orange, blue, and brown color combination.  I figured that since the colors were so bright I should use a more muted color for the quilting.  I went with a gray and triple stitched the quilting to make sure it showed up well.

I hope M likes it.