Grey Cat Quilts

I’ve been designing more and more of my quilts in EQ7, finally using a tool I love. I’ve decided that I should post comparison images of the design in EQ7 contrasted with the actual quilt upon completion.

3xS (Stars, Squares, and Scraps)

I consistently return to scrappy designs, as I am determined to truly use up everything I can from the fabrics I’ve purchased. Part of it is miserliness. The other is the fact that I simply love the look of scrappy. In designing this quilt, I wanted to use two blocks I’d seen around Flickr for block swaps. I hadn’t anticipated the way certain fabrics would simply disappear into the backing fabric, even though I deliberately did not exclude any low volume fabrics when I was digging through my scraps.

Cheating on the Farmer’s Wife (with the Dumb Blonde Next Door)

Not the most polite title in the world, but pretty appropriate for my mentality at the time. I was pretty sick unto death of traditional blocks and exacting piecing toward the end of 2011, so I decided to do a spin on the block ‘Rainbow Flowers’, which is a modified quarter log cabin. Done in fairly short order, I put the last stitches in as January 2012 drew to a close.

CotFW(w/tDBND) measures 64″ X 64″, and used only fabrics from my stash. I used some of my absolutely favorite fabric in the backing – Alexander Henry’s “flora de los muertos” from 2004.

Cheating on the Farmer’s Wife, Part Deux

The original intent had been to name this Fun With Free Piecing. However, I came to the realization that every time I took a break from the Farmer’s Wife Sampler, I made a quilt that’s got fairly simple piecing, and then I quilted the shit out of it. So Fun with Free Piecing is officially Cheating with the Farmer’s Wife, Part Deux.

I’m not quite as torn about this quilt in the series and it’s backing, though I do love the reverse of this quilt. Everything in the backing came from my  stash, and used another favorite print of mine. Not surprisingly, it’s another Alexander Henry, called ‘dagmar’. It’s the floral print in the backing, and I used a coordinating plaid for the binding. Unlike CotFW, Part One, the binding is a bias binding here, which is generally my default construction method because that’s how I learn to make bias binding.

And, as much work as the actual quilting phase of this quilt was, I’m very happy with how it turned out, on the front and back.

Frankenstein

Frankenstein was a quickie in my world, measuring only 55″ X 55″. This particular quilt was born of wanting to use all of my little schnibbles of fabric that were left over after managing my scraps into manageable and useable sizes. I used 1.5 yards of solids, 1 to 1.5 yards of scraps, 2 yards in the backing, and another 1/4 yard in the binding.