My new favorite quilt: Postage stamp complete!

My postage stamp quilt from Rachel's quilt along is all done. I hereby crown it my new favorite!


You can read about the quilt top here and here. I used a Hello Betty jelly roll (original plan was Bliss, but I changed my mind once spying Katie's HB!) paired with strips of linen. I love the combination! And the linen continues to soften with handling and washing. Such a nice texture.

My one hesitation for the quilt along was that my quilt would be like everyone else's. To combat that, I decided that I would spend the time to make an original pieced back:

I had made my quilt top slightly smaller than specified, leaving me with some extra strips to play with. I decided to do something a little more modern on the back, to coordinate but contrast a bit with the very traditional postage stamp style. What would you call this? A lattice? Anyways, I love how it pops against the espresso brown solid! The espresso is also a great backdrop for some good old Canadian snowflakes, as you can see in the photo...they were falling faster than I could wipe them away!
I threw in one square of yellow polka dots, to pick up the subtle yellows in the Hello Betty fabric. Brightens things up!

Quilting. I had originally planned to do diagonal machine quilting. But here's the thing- I knew this would lead to frustration as (a) many of my corners don't match up perfectly and (b) with the diagonal strip pattern on the back, it would likely not be perfectly parallel, which would drive me bonkers. So I kept putting off the quilting. Then, one afternoon, as I was waiting in line at Starbucks (Tall nonfat Tazo Chai Latte with cinnamon), it hit me- how cool would some hand quilting look against the brown? I had 5 minutes, grabbed my tea, sat down and whipped out my trusty "Idea Notebook" with graph paper, and concurrently sketched out a bunch of random boxes and scarfed down a ginger molasses cookie :-) I didn't modify that 5 minute sketch one iota....that is exactly what you see here!
I used Perle 8 thread, in white and yellow- just picked a color randomly for each square. While crappy machine quilting drives me batty, I actually love inconsistencies in hand quilting-gives it all the more the homey feel. So mine is VERY homey ;) It took a while...probably about 20 hours in total over a couple weeks, but well worth it. I absolutely love how all those random squares pop against the back.


To cap it all off, I had the perfect binding on hand- some of my Riley Blake Wheels stash. These teal blue circles were an exact match to the Hello Betty. Happy, bright, perfect.

So to sum it up, here are some quilt stats:

Fabrics: Moda Hello Betty jelly roll, linen, espresso solid from LQS, yellow dot from stash
Finished size: approx 60 inches by 70 inches
Design: Quilt along at p.s. I quilt, back designed by me
Quilted by me, exclusively by hand, using Perle 8 thread in white and yellow
Binding: Riley Blake Wheels line, by hand
Keeping it real: linen was hard to cut in *straight* strips, so some variable size I am sure and a few corners that don't match up....here is a particularly bad example:

That said, considering that I put together the top in just 2 days, I was surprised how many or the corners were bang on:

All in all, I love how this quilt finished up, and it has been happily accepted into our little "quilt family" :-)


Linking up at Sew Modern Monday and Fabric Tuesday at Quiltstory:-)