Quarantine Quilts - Part II
Round two of quarantine quilt fun coming right on up! Let’s just jump right into it!!
#6 - Jelly Roll Quilt
I fell hard for Penelope Handmade’s Iris Quilt last year. I mean, how could you not?! It is absolutely beautiful. Every single color combination looks stunning! I wanted to make this quilt for my angel mother-in-law to thank her for coming to help us twice after my baby was born. I had a cute Kona jelly roll and substituted it for the strips that the pattern called for.
I used Kona Snow for the background, and found a gingham print at Joann’s that PERFECTLY matched the colors from the jelly roll. It was a match made in heaven!
Can we just talk about my mother-in-law’s porch?? Don’t you want to live on this gorgeous porch forever? I know I do!
#7 - Zoo Animals
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it a million times—whole cloth quilts are so much fun! They’re easy, they’re practical, they’re durable, and they’re cute! Win-win-win-win!
All of these fabrics are from Hobby Lobby and the animal print is hands-down one of my all-time favorites. I was seriously tempted to keep this quilt and make another one to gift. Can you blame me?! It’s adorable!
#8 - Minky Stripes
This quilt started off as a bit of a tragedy but ended up truly lovely. I’d originally planned a nine patch design using five or so different colors that I’d matched to the florals on the backing. Side note—this backing floral is from Walmart, can you believe it?!
As you can see the nine patch design didn’t quite work out. When I laid all the blocks out on the kitchen floor, I cried literal tears because it was so ugly. I mean, I was only a few weeks postpartum, but STILL, it was so ugly. My ever optimistic husband Stefan came over, glanced at the cacophonous color mess on the floor and said, “yeah that’s not too good”. That brought out a chuckle in me so I packed away the nine patch block and started making a new plan.
I fished through my stash bucket and found some thick stripes of minky that matched perfectly with the shades of green and pink from the florals on the backing fabric. I was thrilled! Not only did it look better, but it is way cozier.
#9 - Stefan’s Quilt
I could write a solo blog post about this monster of a quilt, but I won’t because it’ll upset me too much haha! This quilt is a monster in two ways—it’s absolutely gigantic and it was also a bit of a nightmare to make. It kinda kills me that most of the corners don’t add up, but I just remember the months (ok it was actually years lol) of planning and math and sewing and more planning and seam-ripping and somehow even more math…and then I remember that in the end it’s all about the journey? the friends you make? the live laugh love factor?
If anything, this quilt deepened my standing in the “imperfect quilters club” (it’s not a thing but it should be, right??). I truly do love the effort and the journey of quilting. There are plenty of ups and downs in this craft, but the end result—no matter how mismatched corners or dye lots (see below) may be—is always worth it.
This was also the first time I learned about dye lots. Colors that are technically the same color can sometimes end up looking ever so slightly different if they are dyed at different times. If you look closely at the photos, you can see that some of the grays are just a shade off from each other. This is because I bought the gray from two different bolts, and even though they are the same color, they were from different dye lots. Thank you to the nice fabric cutter lady at Joanns for teaching me this!
The best part of making this quilt was that Stefan was willing to do all of the ironing! It is a necessary quilting task that I do not enjoy, so having him take that over for me was truly incredible. Not to mention he did a great job and will be called back to do more ironing in the future.
I would’ve loved to send this quilt to a longarm quilter, but it wasn’t in the budget at the time. Instead, I spent roughly 15 hours quilting it through my domestic! It was a definitely a character-building experience (and one I hope never to repeat). The cherry on top was me using straight pins to baste part of the quilt because I ran out of curved safety pins. I practically became a pincushion by the end and Stefan said he had heard enough yelps from me at the sewing machine to know that he need never doubt my love for him.
He’s got his arms fully extended above his head! It’s a tall quilt.
Bye bye for now, you can find part III here!
