This quilt was what I designed when I got bundles of two of my favorite collections a while back: Alissa Haight Carlton’s Modern Solids (sadly, they seem to be no longer available) and Allison Glass’s feather-like prints.

Happy Squares

I started with 9-patch blocks composed of 3 inch (finished) squares.  Of course I couldn’t stand to make all the blocks alike. I made some half-square triangle patches to add to the 9-patch blocks. Then I made some big 4-patch blocks from 4-1/2 inch (finished) squares so that they finished the same size as the 9-patch blocks. Finally, I made some 36-patch blocks from 1-1/2 inch (finished) squares to finish the same size as all the other blocks.

When it came to laying the blocks out, I separated some of the 9-patch blocks to fit the 4-patch and 36-patch blocks in at interesting places.  Finally, I inserted a 1/4″ strip before adding the last row of squares on each side to make a sort of border.I did the quilting freehand on my home machine.  This means I did not mark the diagonals but sewed “sort of” straight from corner to corner in the squares.  I like the less-rigid feel of this technique, but it’s a good example of why it may be unwise to enter modern quilts in traditional quilt shows.  Here again, if I wanted machine-like accuracy I could hire someone to do this on a longarm or even have a machine-generated pantograph design.  In fact, I like both those techniques for some things, but I didn’t want my “happy” quilt to be too-precisely quilted.

This is bright and cheerful, so I’m calling it “Happy Squares”.  What have you been up to?