What a dreary few weeks its been here in East Tennessee! I like winter and I like rain, but I really don’t care for the two together, and we’ve had it non stop, it seems, with one day break with snow. Our basement flooded, and we’ve been taking it apart, right down to the block and cement floors. It seems even houses that are well waterproofed will still be affected when there is 7″+ of rain and the clay ground can no longer hold any water. But I have a silver lining- a very bright and colorful project to contrast with the grey days of winter outside my door.

Who has been around long enough to remember this quilt top?

Its only been about three and a half years since I made the top. I pulled it out a couple of years ago and began quilting it, but soon decided it would need lots and lots of dense hand quilting to look how I wanted it to. So off and on for the past year or so, I’ve gotten out this quilt, and spent time quilting with Perle cotton, lines that run the length of the quilt 1/2″ apart. I had a little more than a third of the quilt complete, and this January after talking to my cousin, who was to be the recipient of this quilt, I decided to buckle down and quilt this alone until it was complete. So morning, noon, and night, I quilted!

I logged over 200 hours of quilting on this baby, and I’m happy to say it is now living in its new home!

Lets talk details, shall we? This quilt was designed around island life because my cousin loves the beach, and these colors were inspired from my few years of working on a small island on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The prints are lawn from Liberty of London, and the solids are an array of quilt cottons from Free Spirit Fabrics. When the quilt top was complete and I was ready to begin quilting, I felt that the solids took too much attention, so I set out to break them up with dense quilting.

The backing is a coral motif on Liberty lawn, and the binding is the ever classic Liberty Capel in my favorite color way, mustard.

All of the quilting was done with a variety of Perle cotton in coordinating colors in both size 5 and size 8. And if you would like to learn my hand quilting technique that I use on all quilts, and see what tools I use, I suggest checking out my Handquilting Tutorial. 

The quilt finished at about 51×68″ which is a good throw size. It has just under 7000 inches of quilting! While the quilt took a very very long time to complete, it really was a simple and straightforward project. A quilt such as this is actually a quick make if you don’t decide to add an insane amount of quilting. This quilt is just a simple layout of squares joined into rows, then basted and quilted by hand. I’ve had several people contact me lately about beginner level quilting, and one such as this could so easily be made following my Beginner Quilt Series, which walks you through everything from the tools and materials you need, to quilting by machine and by hand, and even finishing your quilt with learning to bind like a pro! Its totally free, and I have all the tutorials right here on my blog, and accompanying optional videos right on my Facebook page.

I’m finishing up another hand quilting project this weekend, so I’m excited to show you my latest make next week!

-Meredith