Monday, December 23, 2013

squares, Squares and more SQUARES!



i've been quilting for 25+ years now, and over those years my quilting style has changed. before I was mostly making matchy-matchy quilts, (with no borders!) in fairly traditional styles and colors. in the past few years, I've been drawn to white and black backgrounds, and very bright colors in unexpected combinations. old habits die hard, but my quilts have certainly changed recently.
 
one of the quilts that I really like was (is) Film at Five. I had been wanting to make this quilt for awhile, but with the busy gardening and growing season, that just wasn't happening.

 
this quilt has a bit of a funny story to it. we work so hard in the spring and summer planting, weeding, tending and harvesting our LARGE garden for our CSA that there is not much time or energy for me to sew. finally I began this quilt as a leaders/enders project, and got far enough that I was excited to push through and finish it. I had a nice amount (1000+) of 2" squares that I had begun collecting for a watercolor quilt about 15 years ago. I lost interest in that quilt, and had this bag of floral squares for a LONG time and never did anything with it. I had even taken the bag of squares to our quilt group yard sale, in the hopes of selling it. when it didn't sell, that's when I got the idea to make a Film at Five quilt with it. however, I thought it would be easier to do as a leader/ender project if I did a 16 patch instead of a 25 patch. it wasn't until I went to put the sashings together that I realized it HAD to be a 25 patch for the sashing math to work out properly... so I improvised. all the squares are florals, and in honor of our extensive gardening/farming, I put in a few squares of my favorite stone fabric. I LOVE how this quilt turned out!
 

my two (sweet) little girls, A and B do not have a full size quilt for their beds. they both have several smaller quilts, but not matching full sized quilts for the beds in the room that they share. I had promised them that when we put the gardens to bed this fall, we'd start on their quilts. A's quilt has yellow, green, pink and orange squares.



B's quilt has yellow, green, blue and purple squares. both quilts have the exact. same. yellow and green fabric, but it's amazing how different they look. now we know what they mean when they say pinks and oranges are "warm" and purple and blues are "cool"! we'll take these to our long arm friend right after Christmas.
 
all 3 of these quilts are very different than what I would have made 20 years ago, but I L.O.V.E. them all. thanks for stopping by!

1 comment:

Dar said...

I just saw your post on Judy's UFO page and had to take a look back at your beautiful scrappy quilts. I love that pattern and that you did it with 2" squares as a leader/ender project. I too am a scrappy quilter (always have been) and use the l/e method too.

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