Puddle Duck

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 Puddle Duck!

When it came time to designs this one I knew I wanted a quilt with big over-sized blocks.  I just loved the idea of making a quilt in a hurry.  So often I want to give a quilt as a wedding gift but don’t have time to make a really detailed quilt.  By having a go to pattern with big blocks, I thought I would be able to make a quick but good looking quilt.  I know many of you are in the same predicament as you gift and donate quilts too.

So my design task…come up with a big oversized block.  After playing around on the computer for a bit I thought I had one.  I showed it to Kelli and she loved it.  That gave me the go-ahead to put the blocks together, change up some colors and design a quilt.  This is what I came up with.  The quilt may look like it’s set on the diagonal but it’s not.

Next the design sheet was sent off to Kelli.  At the time the drawn quilt didn’t have a size.  Kelli played with the math and came up with 20″ block.  She calculated borders and we ended up with a 72 1/2″ x 72 1/2″ quilt.  PERFECT!  That’s a nice size..not too big and not too small.

Next up….Time for fabric selection.  We were going to go to our stash but neither of us collect one yard cuts.  All of our stuff is fat quarter size, backing size or strips.  Moda to the rescue.  We thought their fabric line Chance of Showers would be perfect so we picked a few of our favorite fabrics and ordered.

At the time, this quilt still didn’t have a name.  We’d refer to it as the big block quilt or we call it Chance of Showers after the fabric line.  Then one day we decided that this quilts absolutely needed names.  We were at a loss.  I told Kelli I was going to ask our blog readers for help with a name.  We asked for suggestions for names for the quilt in this blog post.

All we did was show this picture of the fabric and ask for a quilt name suggestion.

I scheduled the blog post go live shortly after midnight.  I woke up and checked the blog and just as was going to read the comments Kelli called and said -hey did you see that someone mentioned naming the quilt Puddle Duck?  At that very moment I too saw the suggestion of Puddle Duck.  We both squealed as we loved the name.  The yellow is soft like little ducks and the blue and green give those little ducks a place to play.  For that moment on, Puddle Duck was the name.  (A HUGE THANKS TO JOEY FOR SUGGESTION IT!!)


So the quilt is designed.  We had fabric.  We had a name.  Kelli has sewn it.  UGH…now it was my turn to quilt it.  If you are an amateur long armer like me and you see a quilt like this, you cringe.  All of that white space is screaming for some fancy quilting…but I had no confidence to give it a try.  I set the quilt top aside.  I needed to think on this.

Fast forward a week or two and gee, now that deadline is closer and I still don’t have a clue on how to quilt it.  Kelli told me I better just load it on the frame and stipple it if nothing else.  I couldn’t do that, the quilt was going to be in a publication.  UGH.

In the end I decided to pebble it.  ALL of the white space is pebbled with small 1/2″ or so sized pebbles.  It took me so-so-so long.  It was like 10 hours on the quilt….but in the end, I loved it.  The quilt has a well loved, well used texture it now.  I am so glad that I did it!  You’ll have to check that out when your book comes.  You’ll be able to see how good it looks…and you’ll know how much I fretted over the decision.

So there you have it.  That’s Puddle Duck…it’s been fun reading comments and emails from all of you.  This quilt seems to be not only the favorite of our editors but one of yours too!

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.