Northern Lights Quilt

This has been quite a summer. A year and a half, really. But that's not really why you're here, is it? The last weekend of June, we moved into a brand-new house. We spent the previous year looking for lots or homes, and planning a floorplan, and watching our builder build our dream home. Finally it was finished and we moved in! And two weeks later, we left for a trip to France. I have a French friend, and she was recently married and invited us to her wedding! She said to bring our girls, but I made the executive decision to take only the two older girls, ages 9 and 6, and we left our twins, who are almost 3, home. I couldn't imagine a 10 hour flight with them, let alone the jet lag and physical demand of European travel with two toddlers. One might have been doable. But not two.

Of course, a wedding calls for a quilt! I thought long and hard about a quilt pattern. I'm a little self-conscious about giving quilts as gifts to non-sewists because I'm not sure a patchwork look would be well-appreciated by everyone. So, I looked for modern patterns and modern fabrics that she would more likely be thrilled to actually use in her apartment. I settled on Jaybird's Northern Lights quilt pattern and a selection of solids selected from my Moda color swatch deck. The only problem I had was getting the pattern and the necessary ruler; I wish that Julie sold her patterns and rulers at her website. I bought the fabric through Fat Quarter Shop, but they didn't sell the pattern AND the ruler, only one, so I still had to buy the other elsewhere. I get it: I wouldn't want to manage an online shop. But still, with the patterns requiring a specialty ruler, it would be nice if I could have purchased both at the same source.

Onto the quilt, though! The instructions were great and the ruler made the cutting go pretty quickly. I opted to add an additional color and a couple of rows to make the quilt larger than the throw size she listed.

I knew my friend liked green and yellow, so I opted to start the spectrum with an orangey yellow and go to purple. I really love how it turned out and I hope she does, too! I made sure to back it with pinky so it's nice and snuggly.

The trip was great. I'd never met her now-husband, and he seems so amazing. I am so happy for her! And the girls did great on the trip. We started in Annecy so we could relax by the lake for a couple days while we recovered from the long flight and jet lag, and then we went to Lyon. She got married at city hall in Grenoble on a Friday and the next day she had a reception at her mother's home in the Beaujolais valley. The reception, as you can imagine, was stunning, despite a torrential rainstorm. On Sunday, we took a train to Paris before flying home on Thursday. It was just long enough, and we did some really fun things. The girls want to go back, so that's a win as far as I'm concerned!

And the bonus is that I have *just* enough fabric left to sew up a mini version of the quilt. I think. Julie has a mini version pattern, but with the ruler, I think I can wing it. So we'll see. Hopefully, you'll see a post of a mini Northern Lights quilt before too long.