A Quilt for Us

Over the last nearly 4 years I've been 'quilting' (making quilts? Am I really a 'quilter'? When do you give yourself that title?), I haven't made a quilt for our bed. Lots of other folks have quilts and we have lots of throw quilts, but not one for our bed. That is now changed!

I had been waiting for our 'new' room to be done - we moved into a new room when we added on to our house last spring. The twins are in our old room and we have a new master bedroom in our new 'wing' of the house. It still needs a lot of sprucing, (right now it feels like an apartment room - no personality!) but a new quilt is a good start! When we moved rooms we decided that no pets would sleep with us (previously they all did!), so we don't have to worry too much about having a nice quilt that dogs and cats could demolish (one of our dogs like to chew on things and has ruined all of our previous bedspreads/quilts and many of our sheets).



Choosing fabric and a design was the hardest part (of course!). Two years ago I had asked hubby to get me a fat quarter set of Hope Valley, and had been hoarding it for just the right project. We decided to use that (with some Kona White and Kona Coal). Hubby had to have a large say in the design. I wanted to do the Swoon pattern, but he vetoed it (something about the sizes/symmetry of the corner rectangles and triangles if I recall correctly. It's the math teacher in him). We settled on the Plan C quilt from Schnibbles Times Two. I enlarged it by adding blocks to make it five stars by five stars instead of three by three. That made 25 stars, and since I had 24 Hope Valley prints, I used Kona Coal for the center star.

Hubby even helped me lay out the blocks so that we could make sure each star didn't contain the same print inside that was in the star points. This was my first time making a flying geese block, so I practiced on scrap fabric before starting. I did loose some star points, but I don't think it looks too bad for my first try.



I added four inch borders on each side, bringing the finished quilt size to about 98". It barely fit in our playroom floor, so I can't baste a quilt any bigger than this in my house! I did minimal quilting - just 1/4" outside the star lines on the diagonal and through the center of the four blocks that alternated with the stars. We had a disagreement on the fabric for binding (I wanted to use some DS Quilts fabric that was grey with white dots) and he won - more Kona Coal. I do like it though. I used a grey and yellow and white print from JoAnn's for the backing with a touch of white and yellow.

As soon as we finish up a few more projects in our room, I'll take some pictures of it in there for you too!

Oh, and I'm linking up with Sew Modern Monday today! Go look at some other great finished projects!