
I finished a quilt a couple weeks ago! This one I’ve named “Life of the Party” and the name came to me as I was matching up all the vibrant colors, some of which were streamers and decorations from my wedding last summer.




The process of making this quilt started by attending Tara Faughnan’s “Color Interaction” class in May. Through this one-day virtual class, Tara had us play with color. One of the exercises that was most intriguing to me was starting with two colors that we disliked (each selecting our own since color is so personal) and then seeing how close of colors we could choose altering the saturation, value, and hue, until we liked the pairing. I learned so much about my color preferences doing this!




The second part of the class we started putting those preferences into action by starting to make Tara’s Bars Quilt. For starters, this is really my kind of quilt “pattern”. Instead of giving ridig instructions and measurements, Tara provides a framework. For starters, she provides suggestions about a color pallet but quickly shares that she used way more colors than she lists which immediately freed me up to grab fabrics that call to me. These I added some colors that she suggested that I’m still getting used to working with – peach, tan, reds – just to name a few. Following her guidelines I then cut yardage into 6″ widths and then further cut these down into various sized 6″ strips.
Then the most fun part–to make the quilt I simply spent the next hour or so grabbing one color and finding another color that I thought it paired great with! These I clipped together and tossed them in a pile and repeated until nearly all my cut strips were used up. From here, my pairings sat for probably a month until I had a couple nights to piece them all together–which actually went incredibly fast, in part due to the Juki TL-2010Q that I purchased for myself this spring!


My motivation for piecing the top actually came from wanting a quilt that I could handsew at night. Something that was a little mindless and could be a bit of a pallet cleanser from all the very detailed sewing I’d been doing to get ready for my gallery show in Washburn early in the month. With that, I had a great time hand-quilting this whole quilt, including appliquing my name and the name of the quilt onto the binding. (Oh and I realized such a great trick for this! Instead of sewing the binding on first, I just sewed it to the front, then appliqued it so I had access to the back of the binding and didn’t have to bury my knots. It worked like a charm and is my method from now on!)
Anyway, the quilts already been dragged across the floor by my kids and taken on a camping trip with us the other week. I feel a little protective of it still, but also ready for it to show all the scars of a well loved quilt.



