Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Butterflies in the Garden

Another flashback quilt here...and another attempt at using up my stash and getting UFOs under control. I bought a bunch of fabric I fell in love with at Joann's...some of the first fabric I bought. I didn't have a project in mind, and I kept thinking it was perfect for my bedroom, which it actually ended up not being perfect at all. Nevertheless, I kept looking for the right project, but then I started buying better quality fabric...and this sat and sat.


I saw some pins on Pinterest that were pretty basic, and did the math myself to come up with something similar. The math ended up being really easy: I picked a size for some squares, and then added a small sashing strip between them, and cut rectangles to the size of the squares plus sashing on the long side and the size of the squares on the short side. By adding the same size sashing between the square row and the rectangle, it became a square again, perfect for piecing into rows. It was a pretty quick project, and it ended up being a pretty decent size. It's not a perfect fit, but it sits in our living room anyway, and I backed it with flannel so it's perfect to wrap up in when I'm sitting on the couch reading a book.



I didn't know what to call it, but I picked out a butterfly panto, and when I got it back, the greens and browns just reminded me of a garden. I'm not great at names for quilts, I'm really not.


This quilt was a huge breakthrough for me, though. I decided that the striped fabric would be the perfect binding, but I didn't have enough of it. I decided to do a narrow binding, using 2-inch strips, and just had enough. And what was interesting was that I loved the narrow binding so much more. It meant that my hemming on the back lined up better with the seam on the front. Instead of having a bad stitch line in the middle of the border on the front (okay, not exactly, but it felt like it!) and a wide flap on the hem on the back, I had a nice, neat hem with an occasional stitch on the binding on the front. I liked it so much better! I'll post more about binding later. I may even write up a tutorial, :-)


Approximate Completion: March 2014

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