Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Double Sided Quilt

A Kaleidoscope quilt had been on my Pinterest board for quite some time. In fact, I pinned two different versions without even realizing it! I made this quilt some time last year but never got it blogged. It hung in the craft store above the fabric line it's made from until a few weeks ago, and then I finally quilted it last week. 

I used fabric from the line Blythe from Robert Kaufman. I also made a shirt out of this fabric. 

I didn't paper piece this quilt. I didn't use a special ruler. I, like a psychopath, cut this quilt from a template and used 10" squares. And linen. I made a quilt with a gazillion points out of linen. It almost didn't work, but it was close enough that I was able to manage. If you want to make a Kaleidoscope quilt do yourself a favor and don't be like me! We will be stocking the Kaleido Ruler in the shop, so if you want to make one I would go with the ruler. 

For the backing I had some 6" hexagons cut out from the line so I decided to use them to piece the backing. There weren't enough for the whole quilt back, so I decided to "float" them in the gray fabric. I LOVE the back! I think I like it more than the front!

I used Moda's tutorial for sewing rows of hexagons together by machine. Gray hexagons and half hexagons filled in the holes to make it square, and then I added fabric around all four sides to make it big enough. 
I started quilting this quilt during a video interview with AFN at the shop. I loaded the quilt and did a little meandering to show them how the long-arm quilt machine works. Then I left it alone for a few days while we counted inventory. (Blech.) Then one morning I woke up and thought "BEES!" My quilt needs bees! People call the hexagons honeycombs because of looking like, duh, honeycomb. So between the flowers and the honeycomb, I really needed bees. So I picked out all the stitches I had done for AFN and started again with this pantograph from Digitech Designs.
So now I have a double sided quilt! And I love it!

1 comment:

Sewing by Shirley said...

That is so cool! I never thought about doing any piecing for the back of the quilt either. Love it!