A Quilt for MisterStitches

Remember when I showed a few peeks of a red quilt a while back? It is finished now and I have come up with a name for it! "Painted Desert" from "Grand Canyon Suite." This quilt came out quite big; I can't remember the exact size, but I think it's about 75" wide, and fairly square-ish. It is for our guild's challenge show this year, the theme of which is "Rhapsody in Hue." That was why I chose to have a musical reference in the title.

It is from a Kaffe Fassett pattern that I saw in a magazine. It's very simply strips sewn together using a 60 degree angle to join fabrics to create the strips.

Here you can see how I quilted it, just 1/4" lines on either side of each lengthwise seam. Easy peasy.

I really had fun with this quilt because I had such beautiful fabrics to work with. Which led me to a little epiphany-type thing. We quilters all have our special fabrics in our stashes, our very favorite ones, the ones we are afraid to use. Or at least I do. Being afraid to use up my special fabrics has been a stumbling block for me. But I finally realized that the fabric folded up so nice and neatly on my shelves is not doing me any good. I get a little enjoyment from it when I'm looking through the fabrics for something specific. But why buy and keep fabric if I'm not going to use it? I realized this several months ago.

Working on this quilt, which included many of my favorite fabrics was enjoyable for me because of the beautiful fabrics. All the while I was working on it, I was enjoying the colors, the patterns, and how they all went together. So I don't feel that I lost any fabric, I just used it, and I truly savored it during the process.

Below you can see a sample of the strippy binding that I used. That was a first for me. I've always used one single fabric for my bindings.

MisterStitches really likes this quilt, so it is going to be his quilt. Knowing that, I chose a mottled red flannel for the backing, so it will be nice to use while we are watching a movie on the sofa.