Birthday Quilt in Blue and Yellow

One more finished quilt!  It was a ton of fun to make, and came together super fast.

This is another birthday quilt for a breakfast club friend.  Last year I gave her a cathedral window pillow in yellow, orange and blue, so I wanted something that would kind of go with that.  I was also in the mood to do something really scrappy.  I pulled out a pattern called Field Greens by Madison Cottage Design, and started chopping up my blue scrap bin.  The surprising thing is that although the blue scrap bin is super full, I ended up cutting a few strips from yardage.  So many of my scraps are smaller than 6.5x2.5 in one dimension or another.



When it came time to quilt, I decided on a stipple.  But only in the blue.  I thought leaving the pinwheels unquilted would help them stand out even more.



I always like to learn and try new stuff, and on this quilt I did a few new things.  One was to try out machine binding once again.  I really do love the look of hand sewing the back, but have been wanting to try out doing the whole thing by machine, and this seemed like the perfect quilt for it.

All the edges on the front are scrappy blues, instead of my more common solid neutral.  I thought that would help hide the stitching line that results from sewing down the back half.  It worked out really well, including nice mitered corners.  And for sure is WAY faster.



I only have a couple pictures, because I seem to put that part of the process off for too long.  We meet at our restaurant at 8:15, right after the kids are all off to school.  I'm often trying to take pictures about 7:30 that morning, in the early light without anybody to hold them up, right before I bundle things up for gifting.

But I did have a chance later to take a photo of my horrible thread pile.  Another thing I was going to try out was quilting with this variegated Mettler, instead of my standard Isocord solid.  Seemed like the perfect time to try it out, in the sea of blue.

I got about a 6" square quilted before my thread broke, although the stitches looked good up to that point.  Changed needle, rethreaded, reseated the bobbin, then same thing.  NOT a happy camper, I decided to ditch the thread and go back to my solid isocord, having to unspool the four bobbins I already wound. Leaving that nice pile of thread spaghetti, and a crazy amount of time unpicking, for such a tiny quilted space.  Maybe this spool was old and had been sitting out in the sun at the store for too long.  I don't think I'll be trying it out again any time soon.