Under the Sea

Here's another quilt, called 'Under the Sea' (I know, creative, right, RIGHT?!), I made for another of my husband's dance colleagues. The mom is really into to mermaids, so when I saw Heather Ross's 'Mendocino' line in my internet travels, I knew I had to make a quilt for her from it. I actually order a set of fat quarters of the line. Later we learned she was having a boy, which had me a bit worried. Now, I'm just about the last person to buy in to the blue is for boys / pink is for girls thing. But, I realize I'm probably in the minority there, and the pink mermaids might be just too much for most people to take in a boy's quilt. Fortunately I had a lot of yellows, oranges, and browns to work with along with a little blue. I got some more blues from Tula Pink's Neptune. The best part is I still have ton of the the pinks leftover!

I was shooting for about 36 inches by 36 inches, which I read somewhere was a good swaddling blanket size. I knew I wanted to show of the mermaid prints, so I fussy cut 5 squares from of the mermaid prints. I knew then I could do 9 blocks, using the mermaids in the 4 corners and the center. I 'adapted' the scrappy hedgerow block from Oh Fransson.

I say adapted, which I think is fair since my center was going to be different size, so I knew I couldn't use the same measurements. But, I made a bone-headed math error when figuring how wide to make the 'rows' to end up at the finished block size I wanted. So, my blocks don't have as many rows either. Which, again, is just as well, because I would have had to uses strips about half as wide, which probably would have looked weird.

For the remaining four blocks I decided to go with a log-cabin pattern, but turned to a diamond. I did one in each of the four main colors: orange, blue, brown, and yellow.

The quilting was free-motion in a random pattern, maybe it counts a stippling, maybe not. It seems a lot of people try to avoid intersecting when stippling. But, as this was my first time free-motion machine quilting, that was a bit much for me. The binding was leftover strips, so it's not a bias binding. The backing is a large piece from Neptune. Without further ado:



We were staying at my parents' house when I did the quilting and binding on this quilt. Fortunately, it passed muster with the boss of the house, Missy. I hope the final recipients like it too: