Misty Morn Quilt

I made this quilt for my niece, who noted during Christmas gift giving a few years ago that she wanted a quilt, an off-hand statement I never forgot. Her favorite color is lavender/purple, and I got an assortment of prints with these colors. I machine pieced the top. I made combinations of strips of Fabric A (3 inches), Fabric B (1 inch), Fabric C (2 inches), Fabric B (1 inch), and Fabric A (3 inches). I especially liked the blocks that brought together a floral print with a sharp geometric print, a combination that has a decidedly Japanese flavor. I then combined 6 of these blocks to make a strip and made a total of 18 strips and arranged and sewed them together.

Since the photo above is so poor, here is another view of the quilt, as I was sewing together the strips, with the strips overlapping here. The color was lavender with deep teal cross hatching, in the smaller strips, which you can see better in the picture above.

I named it Misty Morn after one of my favorite nursery rhymes:

One misty moisty morning,
When cloudy was the weather,
I chanced to meet an old man
Clothed all in leather;
Clothed all in leather,
With a strap beneath his chin.
How do you do, and how do you do,
and how do you do again?

I based the quilt on this one from Blue Underground Studios that I found on Pinterest. However, in the quilt I made, I aligned all the 1-inch strips across, with the teal distributed randomly in these smallest strips.

I would have liked to have created a block medallion pattern for the quilting, but given the Christmas deadline, I just hand-quilted up the strips. This proved to be tough work, as I was quilting through the edges left over from sewing now in the middle of the "quilt sandwich." I think my machine would have handled such straight sewing, but the hand-quilting gives that nice puckered-up look. The material for front and back was all cotton and felt soft and fluid.

I felt that overall, my hand sewing (not to mention the terrible embroidery in my hasty signature) needs significant improvement, but I think the design was a success and came through in the execution. Selecting the combinations of fabrics and putting together the quilt top was loads of fun.

This is the first larger quilt I have made. I have the top for a little girl's bed quilt hand-pieced and will soon look to quilt that. Then I plan to start begin work on a red and white quilt based on the flying geese pattern, which I always find intriguing.

Otherwise, for Christmas, I made many lined tote bags for friends and family members, finishing all that work by Labor Day, leaving the fall to begin and completed the quilt. In 2015, I plan to focus only on quilt making.