“Shades of Love in Blue” – Part III

Hi habibis! Today we’re finishing up with part III of love in shades of blue, the wedding present I made for my friend E and her husband J. I should add that I shipped it to them a few weeks ago (only a month late!) and they loved it. It makes me feel so good when I’ve made something for someone special and tried to tailor it to them and they love it. Best part of giving presents!

Anyway, the quilting. I started from the center of my design and did each diamond differently, using threads that blended into the shade of the diamond. For the center most dark diamond I did lines crisscrossing through the center in dark blue thread.  That seems to have given it almost a butterfly effect – my mother commented on that.

For the next ring (still dark blue) I did straight line quilting, four lines around the inner edge of the ring and one line around the outer edge.  The third ring (medium blue) is three lines around the inner edge and two lines around the outer edge.

For the next ring – dark blue again – I quilted along the seams, crisscrossing to make diamonds across the HSTs.

The outer sections of the quilt are all the light blue fabric.  I continued crisscrossing in most of the sections.  The light blue sections aren’t all symmetrical because my design is intentionally off-center, so I had more space on one corner than all the others, so in that section I also hand quilted their names.

Here’s the finished quilt:

Here are some shots of the back.  I love how the quilting looks!

“Shades of Love in Blue” – Part II

Hello habibis!  Today I want to share with you the pieced top and back for the “Shades of Love in Blue” quilt I made as a wedding present for my friend E.

Last week I showed you my HSTs.  Here’s my layout before I did the piecing:

I played with my layout a bit, but not much, and then I sewed them in rows and then row by row to make the top. It’s ten blocks by ten.

I had elaborate plans for a pieced back using the extra blue squares I’d cut and several blue fat quarters, but that seemed like too much work. I pieced some of the extra squares together in one long strip and then I used blue yardage for the rest. I’m pretty sure I bought it from Michael’s.  Does the top right corner look like a different shade of blue?  It might be, but it doesn’t matter.

I didn’t make a scrappy binding – I wanted to frame the quilt, not as something busier. I used a similar shade of blue from my stash.  I don’t have a picture of the binding, as far as I can tell, but you’ll see it when I show the finished quilt.

The whole quilt came from my stash. I thought doing an all-blue quilt would be a stash buster, but I was wrong! I have a LOT of blue.

Here it is, all sandwiched:

I love the design. I wanted something a little more modern for this quilt, and I love seeing people’s concentric diamonds. I set it off-center and used more solids, even though it’s still very scrappy. I auditioned all of my blue fabrics and picked only the prettiest prints within the specific shades I wanted.

Next week, the quilting!

“Shades of Love in Blue” – Part I

Hello habibis!  I can finally show you my project that was supposed to be done by the end of June.  (In the end, it was only a month late.)  It’s a wedding quilt for my friend E and her husband J.

I’d toyed with the idea of using half square triangles to make concentric diamonds, and then I decided to make the diamonds off-center.  I settled on blues.  E and J met at dental school, and one of their school colors was blue, so everything is shades of blue (hence the name).

I wanted ten rows of ten, so I made 100 HSTs (plus a few extras).  In this picture you can see some of them, with my design in the background.

Here are the light/light pairs:

I decided to make this my center:

The layout is: dark center, medium for the second diamond, dark for the third diamond, and light to fill out the rest, so I had to do a lot of math and make sure I had the right number of dark/medium and dark/light pairs.

I think tomorrow we’ll have a WIP Wednesday post, and next week I’ll share with you the whole pieced top and the back.