Today I am sharing Summer Scrap, my summer quilting project. I love a
good quilt-along, and while this was a quilt-along of my own making I think it
still qualifies! I spent the entire summer working on this quilt - each
day I added a single* plus sign and a few low volume rectangles. Even when I didn't have time to sew, I'd still pop into my sewing room to pick out the fabric for that day's plus.
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* Full disclosure: Of course, some days I added more than one and some days I just didn't feel like it
and skipped working on it entirely. This was a low-stakes, low-stress project!
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The pattern is Modern Rail Fence, found in
Issue 40 of Make Modern Magazine (affiliate link). My version is a little wider (extra pluses) and I pieced my border with single rail fence blocks. This was an extremely fun quilt to put together. Sometimes the pluses came from other projects I was working on, sometimes they came from my scrap bins, and sometimes it was just a fat quarter that I felt like using. My kids even picked a few of them out for me! The whites are pretty much every single low volume I have. My original plan was to have every single one be unique, but when I got to the bottom border I realized I had inadvertently reused two of them. Instead of picking those two out and replacing them, I just duplicated a third as well. Many of the white fabrics are the same but in different colorways because they came from the same charm pack, so having a few white-on-white repeats doesn't bother me.
My plan was to take the quilt to the beach (because of the name 'Summer Scrap'). I loaded up some props and helpers and the quilt stand. We got to the beach and it was deserted and the light was good - I love the reflection of the trees on the water. Everything was great until we realized how windy it was! We tried a lot of things to try and get the quilt to hang flat, but I ended up with a lot of sail pictures - the frame even blew over several times. I got a lot of pictures of laughing kids and quilts under attack by the wind. The picture below might not be the "best" quilt photo but it's my favorite just because of how much fun we were having trying to get a good photo!
I finished the top near the end of September, and sent the top off to be long-armed, by Lauren at
Textile Crave. After much discussion about the perfect panto, we chose the 60s Mod Butterflies. It's fun and curvy as a contrast to all the pluses! The back is a green wideback from the clearance bin (the only thing I bought for this quilt!), and the binding is a dark purple that looks good with it. I knew I wanted a dark color to frame the quilt, and there isn't a good way to match a colorful rainbow front, so coordinating with the back won.
All-in-all, this was a fun project and a great way to squeeze in some sewing every day during a busy summer. I'd been wanting to make a rail-fence quilt for a long time and I'm glad I finally did so! I'm grateful to my boys for being such good sports at a windy photoshoot and they were happy to receive their payment for being good helpers: donuts! Everybody wins!
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