I’ve made quilts for my daughter, my younger daughter-in-law and my son’s girlfriend, but I had yet to make a quilt for my older son’s wife. I saw these blue and green charm packs and I knew immediately they would make a perfect quilt for her. She and I have a joke. She likes tons of color in her house and I’m only a “pop”  of color person in a neutral pallet. My son, in fact, says their house is like a bag of skittles exploded inside. For this chevron quilt, I used two 42 piece charm packs and just plain white cotton fabric. As I’ve learned more and gained more experience quilting, I’ve realized how important it is to “square up” the quilt blocks after sewing and even more important, to make sure the seams are accurately 1/4″. Being off by just a small amount over a number of blocks can make all the seams off.

I thought I’d never find fabric that I liked that matched close enough to use as backing. It seemed like all the fabric bolts I liked did not have the needed 5+ yards. I was finally able to find this blue fabric that worked out really well.  And, of course, it had to be on sale. I have discovered that quilting can be a really expensive hobby if you’re not careful.

I used to try and make my quilt sandwich on the kitchen floor by taping the backing fabric to the floor but usually, I’d end up tearing the tape loose when I crawled around on the quilt while pinning the quilt sandwich. Not to mention the fact that once I got the quilt laid out, there really wasn’t very much room left to maneuver around it. I decided to try my living room floor. Using my son’s weights, I weighed down all the corners and along the sides. I used my large cutting mat beneath the backing and would move it has I went along pinning the layers together. I used my fold-out yoga mat to kneel on to 1) save my knees and 2) to keep from disturbing the unpinned quilt sandwich.

Although this works fairly well, I think I’m going to make a modified quilt frame of some type to use while pinning as the floor pinning method sometimes does not keep the backing fabric taut enough. Either that, or only make smaller quilts!

Most of the quilting was strictly “stitch in a ditch” but I did a free motion rose pattern on the white corner blocks.
Once I had the quilting finished, I made another trip to the fabric store to find a color for the binding. I chose the green fabric for binding mostly because my daughter-in-law’s family room is green and blue. I was really very hesitant but once I had the binding on it, I loved it. And the binding clips are a life-saver! I did the finished binding by hand and it didn’t take as long as I thought it would.

The completed quilt. I absolutely love the colors. I couldn’t be more thrilled with the green binding on the blue sashing!The finishing touch, a personal tag. I hope she likes it as much as I do.