Stripey Beach Quilt

Another first: my first quilt since the baby arrived. Mr. 9 weeks old & I were heading to the beach for some r&r with the grandparents, a situation that obviously required a shiny new beach blanket for my shiny new baby. 

looks like someone just managed to sneak into the corner of this picture

For this quilt, I knew it needed to be beach themed and I liked the P. Kaufmann Treasure Island backing I had used previously so that was my jump-off. Looking through my stash, I found some little lobsters (Dear Stella, who knew. Wishing I had more!) and my Sarah Jane Out To Sea. I decided I didn't want to do a full Out To Sea themed quilt because I wanted more color and a more casual feel so I only pulled a few pieces from that collection. I also already had the plaid (too lazy to look up name), Riley Blake chevron, Dear Stella crabs, and Children At Play red polka dots and I decided these seemed like they would fit into the bigger picture. After some completely necessary online shopping for more fabric, I had some more ridiculously cute All Hands On Deck and It's A Shore Thing prints from Dear Stella.

not an iphone pic. note to self: use DSLR more often. 

Since I am currently obsessed with stripes of all kinds, especially on my quilts, I decided to do strips. I trimmed all of my fabrics to different-sized strips and pieced the strips together as long as possible. I ended up with a quilt that was approximately 64" square and I have quite a few strips left over. I had originally thought I would make two smaller beach blankets and give one away but then I decided bigger is better when it comes to beach blankets so the leftovers are set aside for some unknown future use. 

When it comes time to lay out my quilts, I almost always lay out all of the fabrics a few different ways before I commit to a final pattern. It helps me to photograph the fabrics together to I can get a different view on how all of the patters play together. In this quilt, I wanted to make sure that my colors were pretty evenly distributed since I was only using 1 strip of some fabrics and I was going for a random layout. Looking at this picture, I can see that I divided the quilt up to space out the 4 red strips, the 5 green strips, the 2 navy strips, the 2 medium blue strips, and the 4 white/light blue/tan strips. I also had to take into account my binding. I had navy & white striped binding left over from a previous quilt so that is what I was planning around.  

Having gotten final approval from my client, who wishes to remain anonymous, I had to piece together the back to get my backing wide enough. 

oooh, the blue colorway, so much variety in my quilts!

Since I don't remember to take pictures of the boring parts, I will make them even more boring by just typing it out. I basted it all together with basting spray glue and quilted it with my walking foot in horizontal lines that are approximately 1" apart. I didn't measure the lines and just eye-balled it and am actually pretty pleased with how uneven and crooked they ended up- such a departure for me! I wanted this to be a casual, crinkly, throw on the ground quilt. And I wanted this to be a fun, stress-relieving project I could make for my baby so I am proud of myself for not getting all anal perfectionist on it. After I finished quilting, I squared it up a bit & bound it with mitered corners.

prints don't line up? crooked quilting? no problem.

Unfortunately I didn't have enough navy striped binding to do that whole quilt so I ended up with a scrappy binding. I didn't want to use any of the quilt fabrics in my binding so I added in the teensy bit of Dear Stella green/navy anchors I had left over from a previous project and then some scraps of blues that I had floating around in my scrap bag. I wasn't about to haul the (probably crying) baby to the fabric store just to get a few inches of  fabric for binding! Done and done, just in time for our trip. 

One day I decided to make a quilt

Back in the day when I was just an attorney, I had time to play on the internet and read interesting things and I read this 3 year old (at the time) blog post. So I decided I would make a quilt. At that time, when not interneting, I also had time to take on random, frivolous, expensive, time-consuming projects. I've been sewing for as long as I can remember and had made a little hand-tied quilt in college (more on that later) but I had never made a blanket at this level. And by "at this level", I mean that can withstand being washed in a washing machine. 

As a lifelong fabric hoarder, I knew that fabric was the key to my success. Of course nothing I already owned would work; I decided that I had to use the practically obsolete Heather Ross Mendocino from the blog post, because I love mermaids, and to use P. Kaufmann Treasure Island backing fabric, because I love pirates. I'm a creative genius. 

Enough chat, here she blows: 

This quilt is actually kind of funny to me because brown & orange are 2 of my least favorite colors

I didn't square up my squares but overall I think it turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. It took me one or two weekends to finish but it took me a couple of weeks to gather up all of my fabrics. Looking at the picture details, I appear to have finished it in early November 2011. Finished size is 61.5x50.5. I bound it with a scrappy binding because I used so many fabrics in the quilt top I couldn't decide what direction I wanted to go with a binding. I really like how it turned out! Since I didn't want to waste a single scrap of my Heather Ross, I put a scrappy strip across the back. The internet has since taught me that I was improv/slab piecing to make that strip. 

Planning my binding

Scrappy back

This was my first time attempting to quilt anything so I wasn't sure what to expect. I sew on a 12 year old Singer 7468 and didn't have a walking foot or a darning foot at the time. Actually, I don't even think I knew what those were. I ended up using orange thread and quilting (mostly) in the ditch along the zigzags. I thought that I would go back and quilt on either side of the ditch as well but I quickly tired of zigging and zagging- I just wanted to finish my quilt and sit under it while I watched Gossip Girl!

Awesome swim ladies, mangled looking crabs

The coral/orange polka dots turned out to be one of my favorites on the quilt
First of many doggie photobombs

Disfigured mermaids

I'm pretty pleased with how well I lined up the plaid *pats self on back*

My favorite part of making this quilt had to be picking the different fabrics and trying to match everything together. Obviously my jump-off was Mendocino but I added 5 more fabrics plus the backing once all was said and done. Mixing and matching is still my favorite part of quilting. 

Looking back on it, my next zig zag quilt will be made using this technique. I love working with HST in general but I don't like how mismatched my fabric patterns turned out. Live and learn! I've come a long way since this quilt and now that my quilt numbers have reached double-digits, I've decided to start sharing my experiences on the internet. Maybe one day I will even inspire someone to make a quilt.