Groovy Details

Here's a post with more details about the Totally Groovy quilt, just to have something nice to link to the Quilt-Along (click there to see some really amazing Groovies).

I chose the colors from one of my daughter's favorite books: Leslie Patricilli's "Higher Higher." There's a girl in it with brown hair and a pink and red dress flying through space on a swing. We love all of Leslie Patricelli's books! I've never made an all solids quilt before so this was a fun chance to design my own color scheme. Kona Ice Peach, Windsor, Ruby, Camellia, and Mocha.

It was tough lining up all those seams. I agree with some of the other quilter-alongers that this can be avoided by doing the piecing differently than indicated by the pattern. I saw it coming, but in the end I decided to just follow the pattern because I was worried that my muddled mommy brain would screw it up and I didn't have time or fabric to spare. 

 I do have a darning foot for my sewing machine, but have never tried any free-motion quilting so I went for a walking-foot friendly design. I've only used my walking foot for perfectly straight lines, and only on one throw-sized quilt and one baby changing pad, so I learned a lot on this one. The curves were trickier than I anticipated, but I learned as I went - especially about starting and stopping in the middle of the quilt. The long curvy lines of the design were so cool and I like how the quilting accentuated them.

On the back, I made the brown-red seam match a seam on the front so the quilting wouldn't cross it. Though I matched the quilting thread color on the front to the piecing, I forgot about matching the colors on the back. I just wasn't thinking about it since I've never not used the same thread in the bobbin as on top. Drrrrr....

Here's my pieced binding: mostly brown with a section of red and a little piece of pink, just for fun. I love crinkly quilts, but I'm not sure if I want to wash this one if I'm going to hang it on a wall on my house. Gotta look at what some other people did.

This was so much fun - thanks to Alyssa for hosting the quilt-along. Wooo!!! I even learned how to use flickr :)