Party Like It's 2012

Sometimes when I quilt, I watch TV (via the internet). Sometimes when I quilt, I listen to music. And sometimes when I listen to music, I listen to the same album or group over and over again. And that's how I made this quilt. It may as well be the Library Voices quilt because I listened to them over and over and over again as I made this quilt. And I highly recommend you check them out: they're fun, literary, and catchy. And Canadian. After you hear them, you will be singing lyrics from their songs to yourself or out loud. I mean, I really try to avoid forcing anyone to endure my terrible voice, but when no one's around or I'm on a run or in the shower, well, sometimes I do sing aloud. And you will sing aloud when you listen to Library Voices. I first heard them live in New York earlier this summer, and lyrics stuck with me and I have no ear (really, no ear) for music. Just a warning before you listen to them on repeat and start singing.

And this is a quilting blog, so back to the usual topic. I made this quilt using Angela's Apple Crate Quilt tutorial. Her "recipe" is fat-quarter friendly, but it's also super-easy to use whole cuts of fabric. You just need fewer strips: 3 42" strips of 2 fabrics will yield a Block A and a Block B. Or should, except when you erroneously cut one of the required strips twice instead of once. But you would never do that, I'm sure.

I wanted to play with using a print as a "solid" -- or at least as the constant, the background. I had this flower print in my stash and selected stash solids that coordinated with it. A simple block design + chain piecing made this come together pretty quickly. I finished the quilt top in one afternoon/evening. The 4x4 block layout yielded a quilt that measured about 46" x 54". Angela's tutorial provides instructions for a larger quilt, but the straightforward blocks make it easy to size up or size down depending on your needs.

The back is a combination of navy and blue fleece, also from my stash. I'm donating this to Alternatives for Girls, as part of 100 Quilts for Kids, and I wanted to make it warm for a Detroit winter. The quilting was pretty simple: I quilted around some of the rectangles in each block randomly. Just moved from block to block and picked which rectangles as I went along. For the binding I used a combination of the leftover flower print and some of the solids.

In case you forgot: go check out Library Voices. They're currently playing in Canada, for the Canadian readers among you.