May Flowers from our book Country Girl Modern.

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.