Diamond Derby

It snowed--snowed!--here yesterday. Grrr. But that reminded me that I last took pictures of a quilt in the snow. Thankfully, that snow was in February, where snow belongs.

 

I started playing with diamonds in December, sketching out a few different options. Just because. I didn't know who would get this quilt, and just felt the urge to play a bit. The final sketch became the plan, albeit one that swerved when sewing the blocks together. I forgot where I had placed the blue block, but I don't think that slight switch mattered much.

A lot of my favorite oranges and aquas leapt from the scrap bin into this quilt (they're very active, those scraps). In an attempt to keep the strips straight, I paper-pieced the diamonds. This turned out to be handy less for the strips and more for the background as I had very little charcoal painter's canvas to spare and needed to piece together scraps which were easier to handle when paper-pieced.

The back: some fun black and white and aqua and orange prints. I used straight-line quilting, some vaguely standardized distance apart. Maybe an inch? It's hard to recall such details from February which is perhaps why I should have posted this earlier. Oh well, should you seek to emulate it, pick a distance and enjoy! One of the best parts of finishing Diamond Derby (which I just named now, should you have momentarily wondered) was that I got to give it to Yasmeen (or, really, her awesome parents) in person. The post office usually delivers quilts for me, which is a nice service and all, but it's way more fun to watch people unfold quilts.