faceted diamonds quilt

I took a little break during the holiday season and ignored my sewing machine/ongoing projects, but after Vermont was hit with an ice storm, I couldn’t resist grabbing a nearly finished quilt and heading out for a quick photo shoot. The ice was so beautiful and such a nice contrast to this bright and colorful string quilt, and I’m hoping we can call it finished, even though it’s shown here sans binding.

I made these blocks a while back just to see how they looked using rectangles rather than squares and then I set them aside for quite a while. When I came back to them I decided to play around with the layout and came up with this one. I’m pretty fond of it – I love that off-centered diamond and even the way the white strings don’t quite make a solid line (I think it gives it that faceted look – can we go with that?)

The strings are a wide variety of fabrics – lots of colors and patterns! It’s fun to cast a glance at certain strings and remember what project they were originally used in.

I couldn’t decide how to quilt it and spent far too long just staring at it. In the end I decided to go with narrow straight lines through the middle diamond section, then I used straight lines on the diagonal on the four sides of the diamonds. It makes a fun secondary pattern where the lines cross. As much as I like the backing fabric, I kind of wish I had used a solid so you could see the quilting design!

After taking these photos I did eventually pick a binding and get it all bound and finished. You’d be surprised how long it took to pick a binding though! With all these colors and prints you’d think it would be a no brainer, but for some reason everything I pulled out seemed wrong. I finally went with the red Seedpod print from Denyse’s Florence line. I don’t think I’ve ever used red for a binding, and I quite like it! (You’ll have to take my word for it though – I haven’t gotten a photo of the fully finished quilt!)