Friday, April 09, 2010

A Quilt for Gus

One of my favorite crafty friends just gave birth to a sweet little boy named Gus. I was so excited to make him a quilt and decided to push myself out of my normal, go-to simple log cabin pattern. I recently started looking through some of my quilting books for inspiration and fell back in love with the Modern Quilt Workshop all over again.


This quilt was inspired by the book but I actually didn't follow the pattern because the pieces of fabric I wanted to use were not big enough for their techniques. Instead, I cut my pieces to be 2" wide and of varying widths. I sewed them together and then framed the smaller blue squares Kona Sky), which I think they were 4 1/2". The larger blue squares where 7 1/2". I used the string piecing technique for the small pieces of fabric and then again once again to join the finished squares. All in all, I am so happy with the way it turned out and am so proud of myself for pushing out of my quilting rut.

I also decided to get a little fancy with the back rather than my standard all white and pieced some blue and white together. I varied the widths of the blue pieces to make things interesting and my husband assured me that I did not inadvertently replicate the Greek flag.

And here is a close up of the blocks and the free motion quilting. I actually started quilting diagonal straight lines but I couldn't make the lines straight enough to not drive me insane. I tried using painter's tape as a guide but things went horribly wrong and I ended up ripping out 5 lines of quilting and going back to my happy place.