Many months ago I received a charm pack of Lotta Jansdotter’s new line, Bella, and made up this quilt top to show off a few of those squares. I outlined each in solid white and made a patchwork background out of many shades of turquoise solids and a few prints.
As I looked at it, I worried that the background was a bit too busy and kind of overwhelmed the rest of the quilt. So when I contemplated the quilting, I decided to do a more dense quilting for the background and charm squares, leaving the white sections unquilted, hoping it would pop a bit from the background.
I went for a free motion square meandering pattern for the background sections. As an aside, have you tried it? It’s surprisingly hard to get out of the habit of making smooth curves and instead make sharp angles! I quilted a spiral square in each charm square, in an attempt to try using more than one quilting pattern on a quilt. I love it when I see other quilters do this, but somehow I can’t fully embrace it on my own quilts. Maybe I’m just too used to an all over design, or perhaps I need to do a bit more practice… in any case, I’m not totally psyched with the quilting on this here quilt. If I could do it again, I’d probably pick something else (something that didn’t require burying quite so many threads!)
The backing is a stripe from the Bella collection, and the binding is a bit more turquoise with a spot of yellow.
And in case anyone’s keeping track, this makes another finish off my ‘taking stock’ list… 8 done, 7 to go – at least things are moving in the right direction!
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