Thinking Spring Quilting

Another week, another Spoonflower contest. I don't participate in all of them - I won't have that kind of time until Ben goes to Kindergarten! But I was interested in this week's contest: spring floral cheater quilt block. Say that five times fast. But it's January. And it was -23º here a few days ago. Who doesn't need some spring right about now? Put your mitten-wearing hands down. And "cheater" sounds like my kind of quilting. I like quilting and I have a real appreciation for the skill involved in being a good quilter. I personally really like modern, simple, clean, updated approaches to quilting. If I'm doing the quilting I really like easy. I don't have the patience or the precision to be a true quilting purist. Hand quilting an enormous quilt is way beyond the scope of my attention span. I've only made about 4 or 5 quilts. None of them have been bigger than crib size and all of them were machine quilted with very simple patterns, but I do love piecing together coordinating fabrics.

Simple patchwork quilts have always caught my eye, even before I gave a second thought to quilting myself. I think the patchwork is quilting in its most basic and beautifully simple form. A gathering of all those scraps of fabric that when left alone don't accomplish much, but when put together make this gorgeous kaleidoscope of color. When I started this design, not really knowing how to create a cheater quilt block, I knew it was going to be patchwork. 

This design features 3 inch squares of 8 different patterns. Using the spring floral theme I thought about spring rains (drops and puddles) and some of my favorite spring arrivals: daffodils, tulips, crabapple blossoms, and pussy willows. There was a restricted color palette for this contest, which was actually fantastic and very easy to work with. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out as this was my first time really creating a "collection" of patterns all based on the same theme and colors. It's very simple in design, but I like the end result. It might even end up as another crib quilt. I think I'll probably cut larger squares of the patchwork and surround them with white borders because I do really like a good deal of white space in a quilt. I'm also uploading a couple of the individual patterns so I can get those on their own for the backing or bias edging.

All that to say, if you'd like to vote for my design, you can head over here. It's called April Showers. There are some really pretty designs in this contest - I have little hope of placing very high, but it was a fun contest all the same. In the meantime I can look at this and forget about the view currently out my window.