Each day for the next 11 days I’ll be featuring one of our quilts from our book Country Girl Modern.  We’ll tell you the back story on each of the quilts over the course of a few days. If you are interested in pre-ordering our book, you can find that information here.

This is Moda-licious.

This quilt has a fun story…now that I’m looking back.  At one point in time, this quilt had both Kelli and I scrabbling to make it happen.

A year and a half ago my brother and his wife celebrated a milestone wedding anniversary.  Our family went up and celebrated with them.  We ended up staying overnight and antiquing our way home.  While antiquing Kelli and I saw a vintage quilt that we both really liked.  It was filled with triangles and both of us were excited to get home and draw the design out on paper.  We did and we loved it.  We called the quilt “Ode to Moda” as our intention was to use all Moda fabrics.

At the time book writing wasn’t in our horizon.  We were submitting some magazine things but even that had just started.  On a whim I said to Kelli lets submit this quilt to American Patchwork and Quilting.  It was one of our first submissions to them and we were nervous but did.  We didn’t hear a thing….nothing at all.  Being new to working with magazines we had no idea how long we were suppose to “hold” a design and wait to hear something.

At that point, putting a book proposal together moved to the front burner and we decided we wanted to give it a try.  While going through the files, we saw our “Ode to Moda” quilt.  Both of us squealed as we had forgotten about the quilt and immediately put the quilt design in the pile of must make quilts for the book proposal.

So the proposal gets sent and accepted late last January….we start sewing.  Then just as we were getting ready to sew the “Ode to Moda” quilt we get an email from the gals at American Patchwork and Quilting.  They are putting together their 2016 quilt calendar and want our “Ode to Moda” quilt for the calendar.  WHAT??  What are we suppose to do.  We were so excited.  We were shocked.  We didn’t want to pass up the opportunity but how can this all work?  We told the calendar editor that the quilt was scheduled to be in our book but we’d see what we could do.

We ended up going back through our files of quilts I’d designed and pulled this quilt…”Moda-licious”.  We sent a quick note to our editor and she said no problem and actually liked this quilt better for the book!!  We did too.   It just has a little more of a modern feel to it than our first quilt did and the design is very non-traditional.

Everyone was happy and we were happy too  until we realized that the calendar quilt “Ode to Moda” and “Moda-licious” had the same deadlines.  The same looming deadline that the other 14 quilt we had to sew.  It definitely had us scrambling and scrambling A-LOT!

The idea for this quilt came from an old quilting book that showed quilt blocks that I bought at this auction back in 2012.  It was an awesome quilt book that is full of pictures of quilt blocks.  I’ve used the book as a block resource to design many quilts.  It’s truly one of my favorite books ever.  Making it more fun the blocks are all in black and white so playing with color is especially fun.  The thing Kelli hates about the book, the quilt blocks don’t have templates.  That leaves her scrambling to figure out how to make the blocks.  This really isn’t a “block” quilt.  It is made in columns instead.

Construction of the units isn’t hard but it does take a little bit of organization to keep all the units in formation.  Kelli sewed this quilt top and I finished it.

I would really like to make this quilt someday with a dark gray background and some “guy colored” diamonds….Wouldn’t that be awesome?  I can see it done in team colors.

All in all it’s a fun quilt that I am so happy we were able to add to our book.  We hope you like it too!!  Oh and watch for the calendar with “Ode to Moda” to be coming out this fall!

This is just one of the eleven quilts in our book.  If you’d like to order an autographed copy of our book check out this link to learn how to order it.  Stop back tomorrow and we’ll feature another quilt from the book.