I Do - Part 2

I wanted to do something very special for Matt to give him as a wedding gift. Of all of the things I could think of, the thing that stood out the most was a quilt. The only other person who has ever made him a quilt is his mom and quilts hold a special significance in his family. Ann makes quilts for her loved ones as gifts to honor their completion of major life events like confirmation, graduation, and of course marriage. I love this about Ann and I plan to do the same for our children some day. I came across a modern pattern called "I Do" by Cherry House Quilts. It really stood out to me as something that I would love to snuggle up in or hang from a wall while still having marriage significance.

The pattern calls for a mixture of vibrant florals and geometrics matched with classic solids. I liked the distribution of color and pattern in the sample quilt on pattern instructions so I tried selecting fabrics similar. I did make one change that I think really keeps the quilt in line with my style: I used vibrant floral and geometric batiks instead of prints.

I am a big fan of ordering fabric online but when I received my fabrics for this quilt I was a little disappointed. Everything was so much BRIGHTER and bolder than it looked on my computer screen and when arranged my solids and batiks together....well, no offense to rainbows but it looked like a rainbow. I kept the fabrics together for a bit and just let my brain get used to them. Eventually I decided that I would arrange the fabrics so that they weren't in order of the colors in the rainbow. It would still be bright, but not Rainbow Bright.

I sewed the "i"s together long ago but I am finally getting around to adding borders. Now that I am looking at it I realize that I originally intended to do things a little differently but it still looks ok. I think I originally wanted to add another black border between the blue border and the pink and purple border. The fabric is cut so there's not much I can do now...so here goes:

What do you think? Should I take the pink and purple border off and add a black on? I have just a little extra fabric so I could probably make it work. This is what it would look like with the additional black border and a black binding:

Loves Pink - Part 2

In my last post I talked about the initial stages of making my sister Leslie’s quilt. What I failed to stress is how important a role my future mother-in-law was in the success of my quilt. Without her patient instruction and enthused encouragement I would not have been able to start or finish my project. Thank you from the bottom of my heart Ann!

Picking out the fabric didn’t end with my search online. I realized that I wanted to have many different color pinks, many different patterns, and that it would be impossible for me to do so by buying online. Often websites have a minimum of ½ or 1 yard per cut of fabric. While this is great for some projects, it was not what I needed for my sister’s quilt since I wanted a lot of variety but only needed a few 4x4 squares of each one. Sure, I could have bought a bunch of different fabrics online but I would have ended up with yards and yards of extra fabric. Here's roughly the look I was going for with as many different patterns as possible:

Thankfully Ann was more than willing to let me look through her stash. Wow! What a stash! I found some perfect additions to my growing pile of fabrics for Leslie’s quilt from her bag of pinks and reds. I didn’t use any of the reds but I thought this was a clever way to organize fabrics. One of these days I’ll post about fabric organization…We also checked out the local JoAnn Fabrics store and I found a few fabrics off the bolt and a few pre-cut fat quarters.

I finally had the right variety of patterns and colors to begin cutting and piecing my blocks together. You may be wondering how I selected my fabrics. I guess you could say that I’ve always had an eye for what looks good together. I attribute this to a natural ability to analyze the following key elements:

(Key Element - how I used the element in Leslie's quilt)
Color - pinks ranging in color from more red to more purple, black, white
Saturation - pure black, pure white, intense/bright pinks mixed in with a couple more subdued pinks
Contrast - high contrast between the 3 colors
Texture - all cotton quilting weight fabrics
Cut - fits within the 4x4 block (nothing too big)
Pattern - all of the fabrics except for the pink used for the border and lattice had some sort of pattern

I will save the details for each of these elements for future posts. Check out my next post about the lessons I learned as I made Leslie’s quilt!