Empty Frames Quilt


Here's another quilt! I made this one for my neighbor Alisa's annual school auction. Alisa is in charge of getting donations for the auction and when she reminded me about it (more than a month in advance) I told her I probably wouldn't be able to do a quilt this year. I really wanted to make a quilt for her, but didn't want to commit--just in case I couldn't deliver. Of course secretly I was already plotting what I would make and how I would fit just one more quilt into my crazy busy month. Is there a quilting equivalent for the phrase "your eyes are bigger than your stomach?" If so, it completely applies to me! Even when I have tons going on...I still think I can somehow manage to get more quilts done! So amidst getting our house ready to put on the market and preparing to leave for a month long trip to Florida for my husbands job...and working on a bunch of other quilts in the queue...I plotted and (just barely) finished this quilt:


This was a pretty easy and fast quilt to make...mostly because it is just a variation of two quilts I have already made before:



Can you see the similarity? These quilts are all fast to piece because the blocks are big! The most time consuming part for me is figuring out all the measurements for the blocks. The layout is one of the irregular grids from the Layout Library in EQ...I love this layout--you can make the quilt any size and even see how your fabric/design is going to look in the grid. But in my opinion it is kind-of a pain to get the cutting measurements from the program--so I just use the little measurement tool to figure it all out and then add seam allowances. I'm not complaining though--having the program makes it way easier than it would be if I had to figure it all out from scratch with just a pencil and paper!  And this time, since it got a little more complicated, I decided to save myself some trouble and figured out most of the measurements in Excel. Yay for spreadsheets--before I had kiddos I worked in accounting...and I've kinda been missing my spreadsheets...so that was really fun for me! 


So when I was trying to decide what quilt to make...I went through my stash of $2 fabrics --since those are mostly bigger pieces--and decided on the cute brown floral print that I ended up using for the back and binding (it's from the line XOXO the cat by Wendy Slotboom for In the Beginning). Then I pulled everything I could from my stash that matched any of the colors in that fabric. Most of them were solids so I decided to just use all solids on the front and the flower print on the back. That is how all these colors ended up together (the solids are all Kona: aqua, copen, cornflower, green tea, mocha, taupe, white). While I was making this quilt I realized that again I was using blue, green and brown! Lots of my quilts use a color scheme containing some shade of blues, green and brown. I'm not sure why this is...but I can't seem to stop!


I loved how the little "frames" turned out...so fun! It totally reminds me of those random empty frame collages that everyone likes to hang on the wall...hence the name. And it was a snap to piece since each block is just a rectangle with two borders around it. 



 I ended up having to piece the back, which I really didn't want to do since I was in a hurry, but what do you do...I didn't have enough. So I just slapped a bunch of the leftover solids from the front together for a random stripey strip. I won't lie, I'm not in love with it...it messes with my sense of order...but it works. 


Mmmm...the quilting! This is a pantograph I made...(in QuiltCAD)...I morphed one I made a couple months back to make the flower look slightly different...kinda like a little star flower...and I added a swirl. I was going to just use one I had done before (because of the time crunch), but where's the fun in that? :) 


Yep. I love quilting...