A process pledge quilt

I completed a quilt this week, and I'm going to tell you all about it.  I am LOVING reading posts associated with Rossie's process pledge, and so on this quilt I made an effort to better document my process to share with you.  I feel like I learn so much more when quilters share the journey instead of just the finished quilt..... and so:

My niece is home from college this summer.  She's just completed her first year.  

And I had planned since the beginning of the summer that I was going to send her back with a quilt.  

And then a few days ago, she posted on facebook (the great reminder of things...) that she was heading back in 9 days.  9 DAYS!

and I thought, oh crap...  I still need to get that done.!

I absolutely adore her. 

And I'm blessed to call her my niece. 

So I started sketching in my daughter's ENT doctor's waiting room.

I started here:

I knew that her room was pink and black, so I was going to go with that.  I wanted something I could finish before she left, and so that meant no time for fabric shopping, so it had to come from my stash.  

Luckily my stash is extensive...

I also wanted something I could chain piece so that it came together faster.

The first drawing didn't really do much for me, so I tried again.

{Although I may come back to that drawing later}

So this was my next attempt.  I liked it, and I thought that I probably had the stuff to put it together.  I knew that I had a cut of black batik that I could use for the plaid effect.  And I have quite a lot of pink.

Next I considered how to piece it.  You see, if you look at my drawing, there's 2 main ways.  One is to piece the 4 patches and then add the other as sashing.  I think this would be quite efficient, but I was concerned about getting it correct since I wanted all 4 pink blocks to be the same around the cross.  I thought the organization would kill me and I'd lose any time I saved messing with the seam ripper.

So the other option was to piece blocks with the black cross through the middle of the block.  I figured out a really efficient way to do this by sewing selvedge to selvedge cuts.  

(Will post more on this later, a tutorial is forthcoming.)

I was a little concerned that the pink and black could look a little juvenile, so I considered an acid green binding.  I decided that the batik would solve it, but I still like the idea of using an acid green in that color scheme.

Here's the finished quilt. 

A closeup of the quilting.  A friend suggested boxy spirals in the pink areas, and I'm totally in love with that method.  Quick, suprisingly easy, and looks very neat.  The inner black lines are left unquilted.  The other black border is stippled, mostly because I was concerned that I'd have a mess with binding it if I didn't quilt it somehow.

Here's the back.  Love it.  I may love it more than the front.

I used my off-cuts from the blocks to make a pieced border, and I always enjoy a pieced binding.  

Looks like I need to clip some threads, though.

I really dig the green peeking through!  Maybe I should have used that for the top as well..... hmm. next time.

And I quilted a K in one block just to make it hers.  

I didn't actually intend to do that, but I "finished" quilting it, laid it out on the floor, and then realized I had left out that square.  

Oops!  

But it was a happy mistake since I love the initial in there.

I'm going to post a pattern/tutorial on this quilt since it went together so extremely well and was so very efficient and I am so pleased with the way it turned out.  So stay tuned!