Rainbow Blossom

 The four-year quilt-along is done!

Rainbow Blossom was the first pattern club offered by Kristy at Quiet Play and she didn't originally intend for people to sew all the blocks together into one top - it was just a way to share a collection of her old and new blocks over the course of a year.  But of course, lots of people besides me did just start sewing them together!  All the patterns on this quilt top except the music note are by Kristy (I improvised the stem and the flag onto her hexagon block to make it into the eighth note), though not all of them came from that first pattern club.  The seashell is from her most recent one and the Xs above the Twinkle are from Issue 35 of Make Modern magazine.

The name comes from the fact that it's a scrappy rainbow quilt with one of my favorite basics, Blossom, as the background.  After I started making the quilt, Kristy came out with her first fabric line, so the binding and the backing (now available as a wide back, mine is pieced!) were also designed by her!

The entire quilt is custom quilted with matching thread.  The background is swirls (my favorite!) with some loops where I got stuck.  All of the letters are just outlined with no design in the middle so they poof out a little bit.  I was determined to get this done, so I did all the quilting in about two weeks, with a small piecing/recovery break in the middle.  The hard part wasn't the quilting, it was burying all the thread ends!

These are some of my favorite blocks in the entire quilt, and the picture shows off the background fabric nicely too.  This was my oldest unfinished QAL and starting the blocks from the newest pattern club is on my short list of things to sew.  I love having a paper-pieced project going to break up the traditional piecing that I normally do.  I'll close with a bit of whimsy: the quilt next to a bicycle rack shaped like a squirrel!