Welcome to TGIFF, the party where we celebrate our finishes! Around here, the quilts sometimes get finished in a timely manner, but then the blog post doesn't 😅 This week I'm finally getting around to sharing a quilt that I finished near the end of February, which means it has taken me almost 6 months to take the time to sit and give Summer Dreamin' its rightful place on the blog.
Summer Dreamin' was the Stash Artists pattern for March, so I was working on these blocks in January and February, when the world outside was snow and ice and cold. As I sewed the blocks and added them to my design wall, they felt like a little pop of summer in my sewing room. The more blocks I put up, the more summery it felt, until I knew I had to reference summer in the name somehow. Since it was the dead of winter, Summer Dreamin' felt like the perfect name. It's not often a quilt name comes to me so easily, so that was a nice change.
All the fabrics came from my stash and they're a mix of new and old, batiks and regular quilting cotton from a bunch of different companies. Most of the white pieces were cut from my white scrap box, so there are a few brands of white mixed together to make the background. Do you have your scraps organized in a way that makes it easy for you to actually use them? If not, check out my Escape Scrap Overwhelm guide!
Those scrappy blue pinwheels are probably my favourite part of the whole design. Blue and pinwheels always make me happy!
I took a bit of a shortcut making the flying geese for the pinwheels. I've been making blue and teal flying geese as leaders and enders for the last while so I can eventually make a quilt of scrappy blue and teal Flying Together blocks. I knew I had a nice stack of them that hadn't been sewn together into blocks yet, so I raided that for this quilt, leaving me needing to piece only a handful more to have enough for all the pinwheels. Of course, that means my Flying Together quilt is pushed even farther into the future, but I'll get there someday (maybe).
Since the quilt felt so much like summer to me, I knew I wanted to quilt flowers on it. I considered the loop and flower meander I used on Ombre Twirl and New Life and this Formal Garden baby quilt, but that wasn't quite what I wanted. At some point while I was piecing and thinking, I noticed the daisy chain banner I have on two of the sewing room walls. Could I replicate that as a quilted flower? I tried drawing it on a scrap of paper and was excited that it had exactly the vibe I wanted for this quilt.
Now the only question was, could I quilt it large enough? I tend to quilt small, even when I'm trying to quilt bigger. I blame it on learning to free motion quilt on a Kenmore machine with a 5" throat space and no extension table - I didn't have room to quilt big back then! I wanted these flowers to feel big and showy, though, so I had to really focus on keeping them from getting smaller and smaller as I went. I'm happy to say I was successful at keeping them big, so that most of them finish around 4" across. That's huge by my quilting standards!
In keeping with wanting the flower to be showy and summery, I used yellow Aurifil thread (2135) for the quilting. From a distance, you can't see the colour of the thread, but as soon as you get close it becomes noticeable.
I didn't have quite enough of the sky blue for the whole back, so I added a chunk of royal blue to make it big enough. Here's a picture I took in the backyard in February. The yellow thread really shows up on the royal blue, even from a distance!
A bright pink binding felt like the perfect choice.
I had to take the cover picture for the pattern in the snow in our backyard in February, but then Zach and I took Summer Dreamin' to the beach for these pictures in April. It wasn't exactly warm (in the one picture I took of Zach he has his coat zipped up, the hood of his hoodie pulled up, and his hands in his pockets!), but the snow and ice were gone, so this summery quilt looked right at home.
That's my (finally blogged) finish this week 😊 What have you finished that you want to share? Link it up below so we can celebrate with you.
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