A Story of Three Fabrics

Apparently it is too much for me to haul out the laptop, edit and load pictures, and then write a post. So I'm trying this on my phone to see if that feels any easier to me. Maybe I will update here more often then.

What I'm showing you today is a little quilt that was born of various fabrics coming together.

First I had the little dotted squares. It was a charm pack (5" squares) I picked up because I thought they would make great cornerstones in sashing, especially if cut into four smaller squares. (Like you can see on the far right of the picture.)

Then my mom went on a trip to Pennsylvania with my quilting sister and "somehow" ended up in a lot of fabric stores. Well, the fabric fumes must have overcome her too because she bought some fabric for me, including a fat quarter bundle of the bright semi-solids. (They're similar to a grunge look.) I noticed right away that they coordinated perfectly with my dots. (There was a green too but it somehow got separated and didn't make it into this picture.)

Then sometime in the last year when I was at my mom's, she had some fabric from an aunt that my sister and I could go through. We took turns choosing but we both knew the elephants were mine! :) And then look how well those colours went with the rest. Kismet!

I vaguely debated for a while with myself about what design to do and eventually settled on something simple that would use some of each type of fabric in each block. The size was mostly determined by the size of the cornerstones (2.5"). By cutting the 5" squares into four, each one would work for one quilt block. I paired the dots with the solids and made 16 blocks.

Then I had fun trying layouts.

And decided on this:

It didn't take long to stitch the top together. I alternated all the seams so I could twirl the intersections.

And once that was done it didn't take long for me to find time to baste it too! I had just the right size of a different elephant fabric for the backing and taped it to my coffee table to keep it straight and taut.

I then layered the batting and then the top on top of it.

After sliding my cutting mat underneath to protect the table, I pinned everything that was on the top of the table.

I then took off the tape, slid the layers one way to pin one edge and then slid it the other way to pin the other edge. Now it's hanging on my project board again, waiting for me to quilt it. (Shouldn't take long, I would imagine!)