Latest Quilt: Rainbow

I just finished this one. It was inspired by something I saw on Pinterest but I changed some things to make it my own.

It was pretty simple to piece and quilt. The piecing is white fabric with six colored stripes. I also used fabric from the rainbow stripes to create the binding. For the quilting, I simply quilted on the outside edge of each color then quilted clouds in the white above the rainbow then some broken, straight blue lines for rain below the rainbow.

The hope was that the quilting would show a picture on the back of the quilt but that didn't work out quite like I had hoped. The back is a gray fabric and you can see some of the quilting but I should have triple stitched the quilting in order for the colors to show up better. Now I know.

Latest Quilt: Bright Triangles

The quilt I finished this week is for my cousin who is due with her first later this month. (The baby shower was several weeks ago. I had the quilt pieced and the triangles sewn to the back but it wasn't quilted yet. Sorry it's late!)

This is the first time I used my triangle tool. My goal was to create a quilt that was 40 x 40 inches so I figured I would do ten 4 inch triangles across the bottom. That didn't work out how I had planned. The 4 1/2 inch line on the tool is 4 1/2 inches in height (my quilt would have been the correct 40 inches tall but that didn't work our either - more on that later) but the triangles were almost a full 5 inches wide at the bottom. The quilt did end up being about 40 inches wide but that was only because I cut off some extra width because the quilt back was already cut to the right size.

So, now I know the triangle's height is not equal to its base's width.

If you look really closely, you can see that my pieced triangles are blunted at the top, squared instead of pointed. The goal was to have the triangles come to a point. This didn't work because I didn't piece the triangles quite right. In the picture below you can see two of my triangles pieced together - a blue and white one and a multi-color one with hexagons and diamonds. You can see that the point of the blue triangle is far outside the seem allowance for the multi-color triangle. When I pieced the next row of triangles, this not only made my triangle tips blunted but also made the quilt a little shorter than I had planned.

So, now I know to piece my triangles so they line up properly.

It took me a long time to decide how to do the quilting for this one. I still wasn't sure when I first basted it. I ended up quilting around the solid orange, solid blue, brown, and diamond green triangles with the same color thread as the fabric. Unfortunately this wasn't as easy as I had hoped it would be because it required almost constant rotating of the fabric as I quilted. I thought about doing it free-hand with the embroidery needle in the machine but decided against that because I didn't think my lines would end up very straight.

Because of the colors, you can't see the quilting very well on the pieced side and it is also pretty subtle on the back - and I like that. I like that the back ended up with subtle, random triangles quilted into it.

Overall, I really like this quilt. The colors were fun to work with and I learned a good deal about working with triangles.

Latest Quilt - Blue Corners

This quilt was made for J2.0, who was born just a few days ago.

The piecing on this one was really easy, just a bunch of long, thick rectangles. The quilting was pretty easy too. Other than the dark blue stripes, every stripe just got a straight line near the seam. The dark blue areas are quilted with circles, which were easy enough to do but I will probably never do anything like that again because cutting all the strings between on the circles took forever and nearly gave me blisters.

I learned that all the little quilting can pull the fabric. After the quilting was done, but before I did the binding, you could see that the blue stripes were a little shorter than the other stripes. Not a big deal but good to know for the future.