John's Quilt

I finished John's quilt on Monday and have been waiting to post about it until I could go get pictures taken of it. Well, I kept forgetting and then I was going to do it and it started raining and then I was working on the quilt for Eric and Emerald's baby... you get the picture. Today, I bundled up both quits, took them over to ACU to take pictures, get John's quilt all laid out, grab the camera....and the batteries are dead. Go figure. Anyway, currently the batteries are charging and I will go take pictures in the morning. The baby shower is at 1 tomorrow and I am supposed to be there at noon and John is showing up around 3, so tomorrow morning is my last chance to get pictures taken.

Here is what I have so far:



John wanted blue and orange for his quilt. Normally this is not a color combination I would choose, but it was fun to work with and I feel it came out well. I picked up some of these fabrics throughout the last year while I was working on Melody's quilt. Those were the basketball, net, and soccer prints. The blue with gold swirls is leftover from Harmon's quilt. Apparently, I had been planning on making the borders on Harmon's quilt out of that fabric because after making his quilt and a knitting bag for a swap there was still 2 yards left. After using it in John's quilt in the blocks and for the binding it is down to about 1/2 of a yard. It's a good thing I like this fabric.



The pattern I used is called Indian Summer and I found it in the November 2003 issue of Quilter magazine. In the pattern all of the stars are supposed to spin the same direction. After I started piecing the second set of stars I decided to make them spin the opposite direction. This created the cool rectangles of the black and white prints. This is actually the first quilt I have made that had sashing and cornerstones. It adds a bit of work, but it sure does look nice.

I accidentally made this quilt a full size. I had been planning on making it an extra-long twin, with 35 blocks, but for some reason when I started cutting I had it in my head that I needed 48 blocks, so it has an extra row and column of blocks.



On Harmon's quilt I had embroidered sports and graduation designs in the centers of the blocks. On John's I embroidered sports and academic designs around the border. I had hoped to be able to cut long strips and mark where all the embroidery should be, but that ended up being to complicated to pre-plan, so I cut out 6 inch squares to embroider. After the embroidery was done I squared them up to 5.5 inches. The machine embroidery can cause some pulling and shrinkage. Then I played with the layout. I had been planning on putting one design centered next to each of the blocks. However, that didn't work for centering the name patch at the top of the quilt, so I ended up centering the embroideries on the sashings and corners. This worked out really well. I will have more pics of the embroidery along with explanations of their significance.



On the back I used free-pieced letters to spell out Johner Mac. Because the quilt ended up larger than planned I didn't have nearly enough of the great backing fabric I had purchased. I had nightmares trying to get the back big enough. Originally, I made two strips of disappearing nine patch blocks and put the name strip between them, but the back still wasn't long enough, so I put 4 inch strips of white on the bottom and top of the name strip and then used white to fill in the top of the back. This is more how I was planning on it looking anyway. I really like it now. I kept the other strip of disappearing nine patches. I am sure that they will be used sometime. I am thinking it would make for a quick baby blanket for a boy.

Anyway, there should be more pictures tomorrow or Sunday.