Hat on Top, Coat Below
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We All Quilt in a Yellow Submarine
July 8, 2010
This is the latest quilt I worked on, a group quilt done with the ladies at work. I don’t have a picture of the finished product, because I wasn’t the one who did the binding, nor was I at the event when it was presented. Those of you who follow my Flickr stream got a sneak peek of this already. The occasion which inspired us to make this one was a baby shower for one of the non-sewing ladies at the office. This quilt is for the older brother of the baby who’ll be born later this summer. His mom, our colleague, is a serious Beatles fan, so when a couple of the ladies saw the Beatles fabric collection, they bought a bunch of it. (The baby also got a quilt with these fabrics.)
I don’t know the pattern name; it’s one of those Turning Twenty-esque ones that are all rectangles and squares put together almost randomly, which are great for people who are short on time or don’t have much sewing experience, and all of us working on this project met one or both of those criteria. If I’d been more involved in the planning stages, I would have mixed up the fabric selections a bit, incorporating prints from other collections to vary the visual textures even more, but maybe that wouldn’t have worked as well with these big pieces as it does in quilts with smaller ones as I’m more used to making.
I did get to add some variety on the back, as the Beatles fabric set aside for that purpose was not big enough, so I had to piece in one of my favorite prints, bright stripes on a black background. I’ve used that stripe in probably half a dozen quilts over the years. When it came to the quilting, I secured the blocks first by stitching in the ditch between them, then I laid a diagonal grid across them and stippled in alternate squares of that grid with variegated cotton thread. The fabrics are so bright and busy that anything really elaborate would have gotten lost.
There are more pictures of the quilt on Flickr, plus a couple other group quilts I helped with this spring. Go here to see.
In other quilting news, I’m still waiting for pictures for that anniversary quilt I was supposed to be making; I’m starting to think that project might not end up happening.