Stone-Snow-Arcadia Quilt

Adventures in neutrals commenced with this quilt. I've always been fond of bright colors, but it was time for a challenge. And I had some jelly roll strips of the circle print from Arcadia and wanted to design a quilt around them. Enter the neutrals: Moda's Snow (which is more off-white than white) and Stone.

Only after I finished the quilt did I realize that my default quilt has become a variation of wonky square-in-square blocks. Not that that is a problem, but I honestly thought that most of my quilts didn't repeat patterns and yet I've made quite a few wonky squares (or wonky log cabins). They are both quick and time-consuming. While they require very little planning, they do take a while to put together and adjust as necessary. In this quilt, I love the little floating pieces on the center left as well as the stone strip conjoining the bottom right and right middle blocks. A willingness to insert those little pieces and see what happens is, I think, a new stage of my design thinking and quilt making.

As soon as I pieced together the top, I knew I would stipple it. Luckily, my darning foot cooperated this time and the stippling went smoothly (with off-white thread).

Before I pieced the back, I picked out the binding (Slate Dots from Amy Butler). I didn't have any obvious binding fabrics and therefore auditioned quite a few before opting for the slate dots. Once I figured that out, I picked the fabrics to piece together for the back. I decided on a new quilt labeling strategy: piecing the block I would use for the label into the quilt back. That white rectangle at the bottom became the label. Since I make the back a little bigger than the front for ease of basting and quilting, I had to make sure I positioned the back in a way that was definitely included in the quilt and didn't run into the binding. A few extra checks as I pinned and it all worked out.

Hmm, the back porch stain has taken quite  a beating in this summer's thunderstorms but I like the weathered look for quilt pictures! This quilt arrived in California for Erez, the third child of friends of mine. As a family, I think they've amassed the largest two.hippos-made quilt collection at 3 and, as Maya noted in a lovely email to me, they mark my progress (from this to this to the present) as a quilter.