project linus #4

I am on a roll now! Hopefully I can get this one finished soon, so I can feel like I'm caught up. For a few days anyway. :-) I was inspired by this quilt on the Craft Nectar blog, and thought I'd try to whip up something similar using my over-abundant supply of 6" novelty squares. It doesn't look nearly as hip as theirs, but I like it anyway. I think next time I'll add at least one more row, to make it more rectangular than square-ish. I was also too scared to do a 3/4" stripe (so tiny!), so I did mine 1.5". I'm planning to do just straight lines for the quilting, parallel to the stripes, maybe 1" apart or so.

And here's the back... I read somewhere a while back about using 10.5" squares to piece together backs, and the idea has been percolating in my brain ever since. [I wish I could give credit to the person who blogged about this, but I just searched for 30 minutes and can't find it! If anyone knows - please let me know!] I love the mathematical simplicity - you just measure your top, round up to the nearest 10 on each side, and divide by 10 to know how many squares you need. I love that I can continue to use my supply of novelty fabrics (of which I have a ton!), especially the ones that have extra large or extra small motifs. And I love that I don't have to worry about finding a backing that matches the front, or having enough backing on hand, or having to think about how to piece the back to make it wide enough. And I think it's kinda cool that it becomes a sort of two-for-one quilt, with a back that's almost as fun as the front.