FITF: 2014 Umbrella Prints Trimmings Competition

I was really excited to participate in the Umbrella Prints Trimmings Competition this year. I love their fabrics, and have bought many a trimmings pack over the past several years. This year they added a quilt category, so of course I couldn’t resist making something to enter! I showed you a photo of the packet I received, along with the solids I thought I’d pair with them.

I thought about a design for a while – my goal was to keep those trimmings pieces as large as possible and as usual, I wanted to create as large a quilt as possible, all while still keeping those trimmings pieces as the focus.

This design was the perfect answer! You may recall my original quilt in this design made for Valentine’s Day a year or two back (inspired by wainscoting seen on an old episode of the Real World… sad, yes, but I suppose you never know where you’ll find your inspiration!). I always wanted to make another, and think it was a perfect answer for my trimmings.

I used the trimmings as the center of several of my blocks, paired with a coordinating solid. Rather than trimming any of the pieces, I kept them exactly as I received them, so this design really does use almost the entire trimmings packet (I only trimmed just a bit off of each of the two pieces used in the binding!). I kept these blocks grouped together – off centered a bit – and then surrounded them by blocks made up of all solids.

The quilting is a fun concentric circle design, centered over the Umbrella Prints section (hopefully to draw your eye to those great prints!), then filled in around the edges with partial concentric circles.

I didn’t have enough of any one solid for the backing, so again decided to just use up what I had, piecing together all those larger pieces I had left over. I added in the one purple block that I didn’t feel fit in on the front, and then pieced the remaining two brown/black prints into the binding.

This quilt measures about 55″ square.