Friday, September 30, 2011

Rainer's coin quilt

I was so busy this month, with an exhibition launch and lots of other things on my plate, when I realized that a wonderful colleague's baby boy was due REALLY soon. So I whipped up this quilt fast as I could, using the simplest pattern I could think of.
















Here's my favorite thing about this quilt: I learned a lot about color while finalizing the fabrics. See the single yellow rectangle at the bottom of the middle row? Cover it with your finger. See how the quilt gets so dull suddenly? That one little bit of yellow makes the other colors sing.

It was fun trying out a grey background--I've seen this done so beautifully recently. It was also satisfying using my strip collection. I've been turning my scraps into charm squares and 2.5 x 5 strips, and I used a ton of different fabrics:




























I had some multi-colored quilting thread left over from another project:














I've had this large piece of striped fabric sitting in my stash for more years than I can remember. It always looked too hippy-dippy, and I had no idea when I was ever going to use it, but it is the perfect backing for this quilt. Never underestimate your stash!:












The baby was born in the middle of the night during a massive rainstorm that hit Austin, at the end of the hottest summer in the history of American weather records, a drought of apocalyptic proportions. It is chance that my quilt is the color of rain clouds, but not chance that the baby's parents named him Rainer.