Emma's sitting room quilt

Emma's Sitting Room is another quilt that I designed to showcase my new Emma & Myrtle fabrics. This one has kind of a crazy twist to the story, though, which I'll share at the end of this post.

This pattern comes in two different sizes...this version is 40" x 37", which makes a nice baby quilt or wall hanging. The larger size is 80" x 75", which is a generous lap size. I have a scrappy version in the larger size to show you, but I plan to share that in another blog post.

I wasn't exactly sure how to quilt it, because there are a lot of bulky seams from all the HSTs, which makes it a prime candidate for distortion. Eventually, I came up with the idea to quilt it using wavy lines. I first tried to quilt the lines with my walking foot, but the waves weren't pronounced enough, and there was a lot of drag. So, I switched to my free motion foot and quilted this in a relatively short time. It was quick to quilt AFTER I ripped out my first few rows of quilting, that is....but, it was totally worth it!

I used a sweet lamb print from my stash to back the quilt, which is from an older line by Riley Blake. The stripe (which is part of the collection) makes a great binding, I think.

I had this quilt mostly finished, except for part of the binding, when I was teaching at the Museum in Cedarburg, WI, back in May. I saw the weathered shed and thought it would be a good backdrop for quilt photos, so I quickly finished up the binding on my lunch break and snapped a few photos of the finished quilt before I taught class in the afternoon. Ridiculous, but true!

My original quilt mock up was a variation on the traditional bear paw block. I had the dimensions and the math all worked out for two different sizes. Connecting Threads had the fabric ordered for kits and everything. Then, (dun dun dun) my friend, Kristin, came across this pattern, which was already published. The pattern isn't EXACTLY the same, but way too close for me to feel comfortable to proceed. After panicking a little bit, I did a lot of playing around with different layouts and ideas....and eventually I came up with the Sitting Room Quilt. Some people have asked why it is rectangular rather than square. The reason for that it because I retro-fit the pattern to meet the previous quilt's fabric requirements. (Fun times!) The rectangular format isn't something that I wouldn't have thought to do on purpose, but I actually like it a lot. And now, you know the rest of the story. Hahaha!

The pattern is available here, or you can get a kit with the fabric and pattern here, if you care to make one of your own!

 

Happy Monday to you!