Here Comes the Sun

So, as I mentioned, I have two color palettes. You've seen the muddy, now here comes the sun. I also love bright, bright colors--especially for my children's quilts. I don't care what Pottery Barn is selling folks; kids are not especially into tasteful color palettes. They want bright stuff, the whole crayola universe. The next few posts will be about my sunny side.

Here's the first quilt I made for my daughter. It's from a Judy Martin book on stars. I am particularly fond of lime (as you will see), so I used the surprising number of limes I had in my stash (yep, this is a complete stash quilt, which may say something frightening about me) for the background. I pulled the other colors to stand out against the greens. I wanted a multi-color border, so I just cut squares from the star fabrics and then made binding from the leftover scraps. The background is stippled, and each star element is quilted individually in a kind of shape-maze. I quilted a spiral circle in each border square (can you tell I didn't have any children when I made this?). Actually, there's so much quilting that I started to pull up the back threads a bit. I did enter this one in a quilt show and expected to be body slammed for the quilting issues, but instead, I got recognition for color use. Perhaps they were blinded by the profusion of lime?



Here's the second quilt I made for my daughter. This one is completely from a Fons and Porter kit; it's one of the few quilts I ever saw where I wanted it to look exactly like the picture. Again with the lime! I still look at this quilt from time to time, when--for example--I'm putting away all her clothes or cleaning her room, and cannot believe I made all those little 9-patches. Whew! The daisies are appliqued with a machine button-hole stitch. This one is stipled in the background with straight-line quilting through all the 9-patches to frame the daisies. Each daisy has a spiral quilted in the center (I was in a mega-spiral phase!), and the setting triangles are each quilted with a triangular maze shape. I love this quilt. It's so happy and open.



Also, one great thing about bright multi-colored quilts--they go with almost any bright solid. My daughter's nursery was painted jalapeno green and purple. Her room now is painted pink and yellow. And, it still all works. Embrace the brightness!