Monday 9 May 2016

Garden for Birds - Rainbow version

Hello!  After a bit of a hiatus, I'm back!  I'm hoping to start posting with more regularity again, but, we'll see...

Anyway, this quilt has been finished for a while, but I haven't previously found the motivation to post about it.  It's the third quilt I've made from this pattern (my own).  This is the original Garden for Birds Quilt and this is the Garden for Birds Quilt 2.

I made this one over the course of last year as I taught this quilt pattern for the second time.  It was nice to sew along with my students (although all my stitching was done outside class time, of course).

Garden for Birds 3 

This time I went back to something slightly more along the line of my original quilt, with rainbow colours and a low volume background.  A little black sneaked in as well, since I was going high contrast with this quilt.

Simple quilting seemed to be the way to go, so I quilted a large scale meander design over the whole quilt, choosing Aurifil in my favourite colour, 2021.  To make the quilting stand out a little more, I went with a 40 weight thread instead of my usual 50 weight thread - its still subtle but just that bit heavier.

Garden for Birds 3

My stash is pretty out of control, so I have been trying to make quilt backs from fabrics in my stash rather than buying yardage for quilt backs.  Sticking with the rainbow theme, I used a selection of cheerful prints for the back of this quilt, which I rather like.

I'm about to start teaching this class again for the third time.  Every year, my students come up with fabulous and different interpretations of the pattern - I'm excited to see this year's batch of quilts!