Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School

It’s done!  My sherbet pips quilt is happily installed around my shoulders as I type this.  I’m so excited about this quilt and think it ended up capturing what I had originally envisioned as my goals.  A quilt that showed off the cute sherbet pips illustrations (through fussy cut center blocks), something modern (with improvisational piecing), something scrappy (by piecing the blocks together without sashing I got that look that I so love in a lot of the Material Obsession and vintage quilts), and something whimsical (the little pieces I stuck into some of the rings–puppies or the girl on the swing or a snail).

We are headed to Disneyland in a couple of weeks, so we are refreshing Will’s memory of some of the Disney classics.  On Saturday we watched Cinderella, which was the perfect opportunity to finish sewing the binding on this bad boy.  I would have preferred one of the blues for the binding (actually my first choice would have been one of the Pips scarf fabrics), but the only fabric I had 1/2 yard left of was the green, so green it was.  Will fell asleep under it as I was finishing off sewing the binding.  I tossed the quilt in the wash, then the dryer, and felt like a kid on Christmas when I pulled it out.  (I even put it over my half of the bed so I could sleep under it that night!)  Willie woke up and said it was Beautiful, and that his favorite part was the ‘cute little puppies’ so I’m happy with the reception it got.  🙂

I love the back.  I’m not sure I’ve shared this tidbit here yet, but when I was a teenager and quilting in England, my mom used to always make pieced backs very similar to the ones in vogue these days.  At the time I thought it was sooooo hobo.  I was aghast that she’d spend all that time on the top, but then not shell out the extra money to get a few yards of one single print for the back.  And then when I discovered modern quilting this summer and all the amazing pieced backs I had to give a little tip of my hat to my mother, who was hip before her time.  Rockin’ the modern minimalist pieced quilt backs in 1997.

And a few more pictures in case you need more sherbet pips in your life.  🙂  (The back of the quilt got a little linty from when I laid it on the office floor.  I would retouch it, but retouching is my job and I get tired of the patch tool.  Really, REALLY tired of the patch tool.  So instead when you look at these pictures of the quilt back imagine that I wasn’t too lazy to either get a lint brush or use the patch tool in Photoshop.  Also when you’re imagining, imagine the quilt with a blue binding and me without a muffin top and stretch marks.)