FO: Anthro Quilt
My second-ever quilt, woohoo! After washing it's beautifully wrinkly and, I think, even better than the pre-washing quilt.
By the way, there are 5 squares that are upside down, can you spot them? ;o)
I absolutely love the way this quilt came out and have been cuddling under it on the couch non-stop. Arnold seems to love it too, judging from how many times I find him buried in it, passed out.
To make this quilt, I started out with a charm pack of Tula Pink (my favorite fabric designer!) fabric from her Parisville collection, which I bought on Etsy from imaginefabric. I then added linen-colored solid and bits of leftover solid mint from the Robot Quilt, and made half square triangle blocks from all the charm squares.
For making the half square triangles, I followed the instructions from Sew Katie Did, and I have to say I'm quite pleased with how well my corners lined up. There are definitely a few that are messed up, but for the most part they look surprisingly professional considering this was my first attempt at this type of quilting.
To figure out how to arrange the squares, I put them all up on my design wall and then stared at it for a while, moving squares back and forth:
I wanted the finished quilt to be bigger, so I "stretched" it by adding solid squares in both linen and mint. It took me about two days of squinting at it and rearranging before I felt like no one area stuck out or looked out of place.
Once I was happy enough I started sewing the squares together into 9-patches, then sewed those together into the finished quilt. Then I added a linen border about 5" wide around the whole thing, to make it even bigger.
For the back, I used a Kaffe Fasset print that I fell in love with and then added bits of leftover solids to make it wide enough:
For the quilting, I went with simple diagonal lines that echo the triangles in the squares. This was my first "real" quilting and I was a bit nervous about what kind of quilting to do, and how much of it to put in. I didn't want to "mess up" the design of the quilt, which I so loved! In the end I think I picked well, and the diagonals had the added bonus of being pretty quick to finish up. I marked them first and then sat down at the machine and finished quilting the whole thing in about an hour. I chose pale pink thread so that it wouldn't stand out too much but would still be visible, and I like the finished result. I definitely want to do more interesting/visible quilting on a future quilt though!
Finally, for the binding, yet another Tula Pink fabric, this time from the Prince Charming collection:
This binding went much better than the first one, and I know that was largely because I used a different method than the first quilt. This time I used the seam-and-then-trim method instead of first trimming and then seaming, and it went much better. Here's a link to the technique I used this time. I'm pretty sure I'll be using this technique from now on!
All in all I'm very happy with this quilt and what I learned doing it. I'm definitely not done with half square triangle quilts though, as I have another one already started and a new one already planned!
Here's a sneak peek of the already-started one:
Ignore the insane colors, this was taken at night in my poorly-lit apartment!
