Grateful Quilt

I love making small quilts. Actually, I love making quilts of all sizes, but there's something especially fun about making small quilts. Maybe it's because I get to the finished stage so quickly. Or it might be that each step goes by so quickly that I never get bored doing a task for too long (pressing units, I'm looking at you). Whatever it is, making this Grateful table runner was a joy the whole way through.

Grateful is the September pattern for Stash Artists members, and it's perfect for this season of the year. With harvest time and Thanksgiving holidays coming up, what could be better than a reminder to be grateful? Of course, that reminder is good anytime of year, so there's no need to limit ourselves to the fall-inspired palette I used for the cover version of the quilt. I may or may not have designed it with blues first! 

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When planning the design of the quilt, I thought it would be fun to add extra interest by crumb piecing some of the flying geese. I ended up crumb piecing 12 of them, and I love that they're a little surprise for anyone who looks closely.

Texty quilts are a lot of fun, but normally the options for text are to piece it (which can be pretty bulky and involves a lot of pieces) or applique it (which gets fiddly unless the font is thick). Embroidery would work, too, but it's a totally different look, and would either look more delicate than I wanted, or would involve a crazy amount of satin stitching or some other kind of fill stitching. Colouring the text with crayons means I didn't have to worry about it being too fiddly to applique, and I could use a nice script font, which would have been tough to piece. 

I used Crayola crayons in green, yellow-green, yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, and scarlet to colour my letters. Some of the variations between colours is pretty subtle, but it does make for a nice gradient overall. If you want to try colouring on your quilts, too, I have a tutorial for the process.

Finishing at 40" x 22", Grateful was perfect for using up another of my scrap pieces of Warm and Natural batting. For the backing, I used this mottled green that used to be curtains I made years ago for Aiden's and Zachary's room. When their room became the sewing room, I washed the curtains and added them to my stash. One panel was perfect for backing Grateful.

I started the quilting by using Auriful 2311 to quilt around the letters. I went all the way around once, then debated whether or not to echo that. I'm so glad I chose to do the echo quilting! Here's a look at how it looked without the echo quilting and then with it. The letters stand out so much more with the extra quilting around them.

I quilted around the flying geese, and then echo quilted around them, too. I had been thinking about how to quilt them, but I really liked how they looked puffed up, so I decided to leave them unquilted.

The loopy meander was relaxing (and fast) to stitch in the background. It always reminds me of eyelet fabric!

I had planned to use a scrappy binding, but at the last minute I changed my mind and used this fabric from Island Batik instead. I like that it has some greens and some oranges/reds, so it ties the colours together without being as busy as a scrappy binding would have been.

I was working on the table runner over the summer, while Paul was doing renovations in our dining room. As part of the renovation, he took our old built-in hutch off the wall, got rid of the top portion of it, and painted the bottom portion as a free-standing unit. I didn't design Grateful with the plan to display it there, but it ended up being perfect!

Now I want to make seasonal table runners to fit the hutch. Maybe that will be incentive to keep the top of the hutch clutter free. Why does every horizontal surface seem like a magnet for clutter??? I don't have plans for what the other runners will be yet, but I'm having fun thinking about it! I also need to find a small something to put under the vintage machine. Right now it's on one of our placemats, but I want something closer to the size of the base of the machine, so it's not as noticeable. I just want to prevent the machine marking the painted surface.

I'm looking forward to seeing this little quilt on the hutch for the next few months!