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.