the summer of the quilt

This summer I sewed my first quilt! This has been a dream of mine since forever and it took a serendipitous moment at a fabric store in Maine to give me the incentive to stop talking about it and DO IT. I am extraordinarily pleased with the way it came out! It's a child-sized quilt and this weekend I'll be dropping it off with Project Linus, a charity that collects quilts to give to children who need them.

I probably should have taken pictures of the whole process but I thought that might be too much info. All of the colored fabrics are "fat quarters" (quarters of a yard) that I picked up at a 75 cents bin at the fabric store in Maine. I find selecting fabrics to be pretty overwhelming - I love how they all look when displayed together on their individual bolts but once I separate one from the crowd it sort of loses it's magic. As it turned out I bought the wrong number of fat quarters and didn't buy nearly enough of the main fabric (the white fabric with the red design) but I think it all worked out. I bought the fabrics over the 4th of July weekend and finished the quilt this week. It actually took a surprisingly little amount of time - I mainly sewed for an hour once a week. I think taking my time with the quilt helped me visualize the process and understand what I was doing. This was a really great project for learning my sewing machine, learning about fabrics and understanding the sewing process.

This is the front of the quilt:
Detail of the main fabric (white fabric with red pattern) and the borders. I actually wasn't all that impressed with the quilt until I sewed on the red border - it really brought all the fabrics together in a cohesive way and I totally fell in love with the quilt!
A closer picture of the blocks. I love the white bubble fabric (upper left) and the red flower fabric (lower left).
I must have spaced out when buying the fabric because I bought way too little of the main fabric. Maybe I was looking at the wrong pattern dimensions? Unfortunately I didn't realize that I bought too little until it was time to make the back of the quilt. Fortunately my mom had some leftover white fabric that I used. Normally backs of quilts are one fabric - either a solid or something matching the fabric used on the front of the quilt. Because of the weird amounts of fabric that I ended up with I chose to do a geometric pattern that reminds me of a Mondrian painting. Having two patterned sides makes the quilt reversible.
Detail of the back:
More detail of the back:
This was a great project and I am so proud that it's going to be used by a needy child! I am definitely going to do this again next summer and I've already started planning the next pattern!