Four More Quilt Finishes for 2016

Hello friends! I thought I'd wrap up 2016 with a big post on my quilt finishes from 2016 that I never got around to blogging about. First up, back in the Spring I participated in Kate Basti's rainbow mini quilt swap on Instagram. You can see all the quilts at #rainbowminiswapr2.

I started by taping four pieces of graph paper together and paper piecing stripes to the graph paper. 

After I removed the paper I sewed the stripey fabric into a tube, and then cut strips and split two of them at the red square, two at the orange square, and so on for every color variation, and sewed them back together separated by gray crosshatch strips.

I quilted in a crosshatch pattern to mimic Carolyn Friedlander's gray crosshatch fabric.

And here's the lovely quilt I received in return from @just_anne_marie! 

Next, in October I finished a quilt for my dear friends Grayce's new baby E. Grayce and I both love the Cathedral Windows quilt pattern and rainbow quilts so I tried to give it a try. I followed the Missouri Quilt Company's Cathedral Windows method, which was the simplest method I could find. This quilt required a shocking amount of fabric: 61 rainbow five-inch charm squares, 144 white five-inch charm squares, and 288 gray five-inch charm squares. It made for a surprisingly heavy quilt!

I spent a lot of time noodling around with the color layout. Here's one of the layouts I toyed with. I ended up using most but not all of my colored charm square options. 

Here was my final layout, right before I pinned all of the colored squares down and started sewing the cathedral windows.

Next up, I finished a quilt for dear friend Heidi's new baby L. Heidi and her guy are California-cool, minimalist no-fuss types. I was inspired by this album cover and this quilt for my design. I was going for an abstract sunset over the Pacific mixed with a sailboat sail. 

First I cut strips and sewed them together, and then layered the striped fabric with a piece of white Kona cotton of the same dimensions. I cut them both diagonally, and sewed each striped piece to a white piece, and all of a sudden I had two quilt tops! 

I hand-quilted this one for baby L. I was incredibly happy with how it turned out. This quilt solidified my love for hand quilting - both the act and the look of the finished product. I think there's a good chance that this one will have a serious influence on quilts I design in the future. 

Last but not least, I made a quilt for one of my oldest friends Katie's baby girl L. Baby L's nursery was going to be purple and green, which were my favorite colors as a little girl. Katie loves dahlias so I decided to make a giant dahlia quilt for baby L. 

I used this tutorial, which was very helpful. Each of the color arcs is glued together before they are sewed together. 

I did my first free-motion quilting in the center, meant to look like petals at the center of a dahlia. 

I wish you all peace and happiness in 2017! - j