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.

Today’s feature quilt is Modern Day Patriot.

This quilt I love.  Kelli is always giving me a hard time about my quilt designing.  Way to often I design quilt in red, white and blue.  She laughs and teases me.  She ends up telling me to change this color to that and the other color to that and pretty soon my patriotic quilts morph into something different.  I love red, white and blue together.  I love patriotic quilts.  Plus I sometimes feel like I am challenged by color coordination.  I know red, white and blue go together so I just gravitate towards it.

For long time blog readers you might think the quilt looks familiar….it should.  Remember our quilt that was the cover quilt on Quilty?

I designs are similar.  In fact, I designed the Quilty version first.  I had it in red, white and blue colors.  Then Kelli and I talked about it and decided to change it up substituting the green in for the blue.  We sent it to Quilty to see if they’d like to accept it.  In the meantime, the red, white and blue version was on my computer screen.  I did the whole “what if” game asking myself what if we did keep it as a patriotic quilt and somehow added stars?

This is what we came up with.  We debated on what to do…do we resubmit it to Quilty?  Do we keep it for ourselves?

We kept the star version and decided to add it to the book.  We thought it would be fun to include a more modern version of a patriotic quilt.  We know so many of you donate your time and talents to make Quilts of Valor.  We know many of you are making quilts for your own loved ones who are protecting our country.  We also know that many of you, like us, donate quilts for charity projects like the local fire departments.   We wanted to give a pattern to fulfill that need.  This quilt would be good for all those causes.  Depending on the size you need borders can easily be added or subtracted.

This one I sewed…Kelli sewed the Christmas version for Quilty.  This would be fun to sew up by changing the blue to black…making it in Christmas colors…making it in three colors of your favorite sports team.  There are LOTS of possibilities with this one.  Change it up and make it your quilt.

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.

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.

Today we are featuring our quilt May Flower.

I started out designing this one several years ago.  In fact it was part of a group of quilts I really designed before I really knew much about designing, quilt construction or pattern writing.

I have always loved quilts that have a red cross in them and always liked quilts like Grandmother’s Flower garden.  I experimented to see what would happen if I mixed the two and made a more modern looking version.

I came up with the “block” thinking that the quilt would be 2 1/2″ strip friendly.  I liked the idea but that’s all it was- an idea drawn out on paper.  I showed it to Kelli and she liked it but at the time, neither one of us knew how to break it down to construct it.  Plus the original design had an elaborate border on it that we just didn’t know how to tackle at all.

Fast forward about two years.  Kelli and I by now were designing quilts and writing patterns.  We were thinking about putting things together for a book proposal and were wading through the stacks of designs I had.  This one caught our eye and we thought it was time to try to figure out  how to construct the quilt.  Kelli insisted that rather than 2 1/2″ based the blocks be based off 1 1/2″ strips.  Without thinking much I said okay and added blocks to the quilt.

Kelli took the computer generated drawing home and went to work breaking the quilt down into blocks and connector blocks.

We could see that it was do-able and we could see that once that outside border was off, we loved the quilt!  Now the next challenge was to pick some fabric.  We’ve learned that with scrappy quilts it’s always best to have a color or two that are always constant.  For us we decided that would be the center red crosses and the teal stars.  Although we easily could have, we didn’t go to our scrap bucket for this one.  We went to Andoover Fabrics and tapped into their arsenal of fabric.  We ended up picking prints from Allison Glasses collections.

This one is all of that.  Of all of the quilts in the book, this one is likely the most challenging…not in actual piecing but in organization.  But…it’s right near the top of the list as my favorite.  I just love the colors and the look.

Once the fabric came I added my two cents and told Kelli that no-we couldn’t make that quilt 1 1/2″ based as the stars would be too small to comfortably make.  She agreed.

The wedding planning stopped progress on the quilt.  Kelli was the sewer of this quilt top.  She likes sewing quilt that require organization and a variety of different blocks I don’t.  So I didn’t step in and finish it, it just waited until after the wedding.

The wedding passed.  Kelli sewed the top and brought it home.  She was so excited and opened the quilt top for me to see.  The quilt went on forever and ever.  IT WAS GIGANTIC!!!  I said what was she thinking.  Kelli didn’t know what I meant.  I said this is HUGE!  Honestly, it was over 120″ x 120″!!  She said I just made it according to your drawing.  UGH!!

Remember I had added the blocks because she had wanted it 1 1/2″ based??  Well she had forgotten that with all the wedding hoopla and made the same amount of blocks only 2 1/2″ based.  She ended up taking the quilt top home and did some ripping and resewing to get to a more usable size.

Each quilt has a story…this one was just a funny story.

In the end, this quilt is right near the top of the list of my favorite quilts from the book.  Once we get all the quilts back and they make the rounds, I think this one might retire to my bed as my summer quilt.  I just love the colors and the design of it…and it is still big enough to cover my queen sized bed!!

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.

Each day for 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 our quilt Connect Four from our book Country Girl Modern.  You might remember a couple days ago I told you about the quilt Rainbow Connection and explained that the design came to me while I was in the shower.  Can you believe on the very same day in the very same shower session about a minute after Rainbow Connection came to me…this quilt idea came to me.  How’s that for believe-ability??  It is honestly true.  If I was smart I maybe should have stayed in the shower a little bit longer and seen if another idea came but I had to get out and get the two ideas written down before I lost them.

Can you believe that I put a towel on me and went immediately to the computer and started drawing them out?  Yep.  In a towel this quilt was designed.  (how’s that for too much information??!)

Anyway, the goal of the this quilt was three fold….easy-manly-charm pack friendly.  We reached all of the goals.  You can see that construction would be easy.  It’s made by creating two different blocks then alternating and turning them to create the pattern.

We picked a dark blue background to float the scrappy segments in giving it a manly appeal but I’m a girl and I like it too.  Imagine a pretty purple background and some girlish colored scraps.  It could easily work.  There are lots of possibilities for changing up colors…a red background with black and white scraps could be fun too.

We designed it to be charm pack friendly.  If you have two charm packs, they can create the scrappiness or you could just hit up your scrap bin for 2 1/2″ squares.

This is another quilt that I sewed.  It just happened that the quilts that I showed so far have all been sewn by me….Yes, Kelli did her share of the sewing.  It just so happens that I sewed the easy quilts…and so far, we’ve only shown the easy ones!!

We did make our version using 2 Moda Charm Packs of One for You One for Me fabric line and a Moda Bella Solid.  They worked great for this project.

Neither of the above pictures of the quilt are my favorite of it.  I do REALLY like the photo of it on the cover of our book as it’s draped over the tractor.

When we were at the photo shoot it was suggested to take the picture of the quilt on the tractor.  Kelli and I thought it was a great idea.  Then we got over to the tractor and started positioning the quilt.  WHAT???  The tire tractor was flat.  I figured we couldn’t take a picture if the tire was flat.  The photographer and our editor laughed saying all the photos would be cropped and no one will ever know that the tire was flat!  (I guess the forgot that I blog and am known for being super honest!)

So now you know…the front tire on the tractor was indeed flat!  (but that top part that you see wasn’t flat-HA!!)

I feel like I should say that I’m Paul Harvey “and now you know the rest of the story”.

Anyway…that’s the story on Connect Four from first creative idea in the shower to on the cover of our book draped over a vintage tractor with a flat tire.

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.