Put A Bird On It

Sometimes it's really tough to pick which pictures to post of quilts. In this case, I kind of wanted to show the back first since, frankly, it's my favorite back ever and possibly my favorite quilt ever. I've had the opportunity to look at, pet, and lust after this quilt for a while now, as I finished it last winter and I've been waiting for just the right recipient. This is a quilt that I really wish I made bigger. It's a large baby quilt that I should have made as a lap quilt for me. But I didn't realize it until I finished it and fell in love with it and, moreover, I didn't have enough fabric to make it any bigger.

The front combines batiks my friend Katie gave me, some Aracdia scraps, and two favorite solids (the cranberry and the orange). It was the addition of the solids that really made me love the quilt. The orange, cranberry, and teal together really make me happy. I don't use batiks that often, but these were beautiful, luscious, saturated batiks. And they didn't have weird wax-relief images (I know that's the point of batiks, but I prefer the ones that are just dyed fabric). I made as many square-in-square blocks I could with the little amount of Arcadia I had and then cut 6" squares out of the other fabrics for the bulk of the blocks. I played with the arrangement until it felt right to me and then sewed it together.

A few weeks ago, my friends Sarah and Daniel came over for dinner. My roommate and I were in the midst of deciding what color to paint our living room and trim (because while I love cranberry as a color, it is a poor poor choice for trim. Consider that my PSA of the day: don't paint your trim cranberry. Future occupants will question your sanity). Anyhow, Sarah expressed her preference for painting everything white, whereas I'd paint everything a deep version of whatever color I most like if I had my way. She joked about making sure the baby would be surrounded by white. At which point I realized I had the perfect quilt to offer as the punch of color.

And the back -- my favorite part -- is really white (off-white, really) with little punches of color. I've been collecting shot cottons in the colors of this quilt, and I think I'm going to make a lap-size version of the above as a quilt for me. But I digress. The back is improv + negative space, all pieced with leftovers from the front and an off-white solid from my stash.

I quilted it with diagonal lines, in a cross-hatch pattern, but sometimes doubling and tripling the lines (randomly). I'm finding that as much as I love modern quilts (and I do), I also love modern quilts with variations of more traditional quilting. There is something about the random single/double/triple cross-hatch that appeals to me. And not surprisingly, I bound the quilt in the orange solid, another feature that contributes to my love of this quilt (and yet I have no idea what orange this is or who made it. I had about 1/2 yard in my stash, and I know it's not Moda, but that's all I know). Although I was away and couldn't attend the Sarah's shower on Sunday, my agent delivered it for me. I figure I need to start corrupting this child with splashes of color as early as possible.