It's spring!

I mentioned the spring quilt using the Eden fabric line in an earlier post. Posting about it seems to have motivated me to actually get started on it. After a great deal of thought, I decided on this design:

I had considered several other designs, including one that was very similar to this one except that each solid was associated with one of the prints rather than being all together.

I like the way this turned out, but I think it's interesting how much more pronounced the solid colors are than the prints. I had figured that the prints would stand out more than the solids because of their interesting patterns, but the large solid blocks are the part of the quilt that draws the eye.

The assembly of this quilt required a lot of organization. The longest section of each print is the center of one block, which means that each of the four corners of the block have a different solid. It was sort of challenging to keep everything organized enough to get the right solids in the correct corner of each block. Of course, I'm so naturally organized that this wasn't a problem and I didn't have to rip out a single seam (NOT).

The white is Kona snow that I'd bought as a remnant. It was a weird 60" wide piece of fabric, but it worked great for this application because I didn't have to sew many pieces together to make the border.

Here's a close-up of the border. I was originally going to put a border of squares around the whole thing, but the central part ended up being a lot more square than I had pictured, so I just added squares onto two ends to make it longer compared to its width.

One of the things that I had wanted to do with this quilt was to practice my free-motion technique by doing some sort of cool design in each of the blocks. I bought this plastic stencil that happily fits just inside my print blocks. I tried to take a picture of the actual quilting, but the thread blends in too well. If you look at the picture above (of the border) you can barely see the quilting.

I'm still trying to decide how to quilt the solid areas. Should I use the same cream colored thread that I'm using for the prints? It'll really show up on those bright solid colors, so all my mistakes will show badly. I think that contrasting quilting will also make the solid colors stick out even MORE which really isn't my goal. The alternative is to use a matching thread color for each of the blocks, but the back is a white fabric with little pastel flowers on it, so colors will really show up on that. I could try using the cream in my bobbin and the solid for the top thread, but I'm afraid that if my tension isn't perfect, dots of the wrong color will show up on the wrong side and just look stupid. I'll probably have to try several variations and see what I like best. Any thoughts?

I haven't decided how I'm going to quilt the borders yet. It's a work in progress. It does make my kitchen feel very much like spring, though.