kites in the clouds quilt

I’m really excited to have finished up this quilt! As I may have mentioned last time, this is the first quilt I’ve made that’s made up entirely of solids. And I wonder now why I waited so long!

This quilt got its start many, many months ago. At that time, I had just finished my Flying Farfalle quilt, and wanted to make a second similar quilt. Instead of using white for the main solid, I went with Kona Coal and paired it with lots of Kona scraps. To make the colors pop, I outlined them with a tiny bit of white.

I intended to lay it out the same way as the Flying Farfalle quilt, but then Morgan started playing with the layout while it was up on the design wall and turned it into this instead. I love the imperfect little colored diamonds (or kites!) it creates.

I kept the backing pretty simple, using lots more Kona Coal, along with just a couple tiny strips of colored solids. I knew I wanted to use a dark gray thread for quilting, and I don’t love the look of a dark thread on lighter colored fabrics, so I figured I’d keep the backing mostly gray to avoid that.

It took a while to decide how to quilt it – again, mainly because I wanted to avoid the look of the dark thread going through the white and lighter colored fabrics. Finally I came up with this big zig zag quilting pattern which goes through each block, but avoids the colored diamonds. I did a double line zig zag horizonally through the quilt, and I love how it looks.

And yes, Max now has yet another new quilt! I realize this is really thinking in advance (and I’m sure there will be many other quilts before this), but I think this might make a great quilt when he moves to a toddler bed. But for now, we’ll use it as another playmat!