chain of diamonds

Welcome to day 8 of the No Scrap Left Behind blog tour! Cheryl, my good friend (and co-author of Sunday Morning Quilts!) is showing her version of the chain of diamonds quilt today. She made her quilt top two weeks! That's pretty intense, considering that there are 1709 seams in the quilt. (She counted them, not me. Ha!) I love that she used some of her Tag fabric in her quilt and that she put her own twist on the pattern. That's the way it should be! Her post made me teary-eyed in the best way. Please be sure to visit Cheryl and check out her amazing quilt! Of course, she is giving away a copy of the book, too.

This is one of the more intense quilts from the book, but I have to say that it was totally worth it! This is also the smallest quilt in the book, finishing at 50" x 60", which is still an appropriate lap size quilt. I wanted ALL of these quilts to be something that I could snuggle under!

This quilt utilizes the binding triangles... you know, the triangles that are cut off after mitering strips of binding together. (You can go ahead and groan.... I'm used to it!) I used a variety of whites and creams from the scrap basket for the background pieces, because I wanted this to be a true scrap quilt.

I pieced this quilt a little bit at a time. After pressing the blocks, I piled them in a basket and trimmed them in the evenings or whenever I had a spare moment. It helped to break down the tasks into little, bite-sized pieces. As the blocks were completed, I put them up on a design wall so I could see my progress. As the quilt grew, the motivation to keep going increased. (That is a very good thing!) It also helped me to see what colors or values that I needed to add.



If the quilt is a little too intense for your liking, this pattern would make a great throw pillow. The blocks finish at 2", so you wouldn't even need to scale down the pattern at all. Bonus!