Finish It Friday ~ Birds & Blooms Quilt Top

This quilt top began with the leftovers of a set of fabric in the Alegria lin from Cloud 9 by designer Geninne Zlatkis that I bought about eight years ago and used to made a little spring/summer bunting. I had planned to make the rest into a table runner, but when I sat down to make a list of things to finish this year (this year being my year of finishing all the things), the idea just didn't excite me. Did I really need another table runner? And wouldn't it just get all stained and dirty from the sloppy people I live with? 

Instead I would make a quilt--a quilt for my own bed, which I've never made before. It would be both pretty and practical. C and I use a down comforter most of the year, but there are a few weeks in the summer where it's too warm for goose feathers. But even on those hot nights, when I lie down beneath a sheet and thin blanket an C sprawl on top of the blanket with a fan blasting him (which I turn off, because I can't stand to sleep with a fan blowing), he ends up getting up in the night and rummaging in the closet to find additional blankets, which inevitably don't fit my aesthetic--scratchy red wool things. I've been meaning to make a summer quilt to solve this problem for a long while.

I was able to find a couple of pieces from the Alegria line online, enough to make borders (albeit in two different colorways), but I had to find other fabrics to fill out a whole quilt. I went with another Cloud 9 line, Birds & Branches, as well as fabrics from Cotton & Steel and Rifle & Paper, all selected from tiny pictures on the internet, with great hopes that they would all work together, since the quilt stores around me are still closed. I added in some fabric from my stash, including a couple of Kaffe Fasset prints (there always has to be Kaffe Fasset) and then arranged them in 4-patch blocks, because I was afraid just random arrangement of all this disparate fabrics would be too much, even for me.

 

Since I chose a pattern of 4 and 8-inch squares, it came together quickly, and I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out, even though it's more pastel than bright, which is my general go-to color zone.