Rainbow Connection 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.

Amazingly, many of my quilt designing ideas come while I am taking a shower.  I know that sounds crazy but in my life that time in the shower is one place where I can clear my head from all the things I have to do and that’s when inspiration often strikes.  I can’t wait until we’re in the new house and I can take a bath in the claw foot tub, I can’t imagine all the quilt designs I’ll come up with then.

Anyway, when this design came to me we already had most of the quilts for the book selected.  Kelli and I had talked about it and were hoping to come up with a beginner friendly scrappy quilt.  I kept thinking about what makes beginner quilts fun and will get someone hooked on quilting.  For me that would be playing and digging in scraps AND a quilt that would be virtually fail proof.

Just a few days before designing this I had purchased a bag of scraps from the thrift store and was sorting them all by color.  The reds went in one tote, the greens in another and the rest of the colors all going in their respective totes.

About that same time I was razzing Kelli about yet another quilt she had “almost” finished.  Kelli hates putting borders on quilts.  Often she pieces the center and just quits when it’s border time.

In the shower I was thinking about borders-about beginner friendly and about scraps of fabrics sorted by color….this quilt idea popped into my brain.  What if a quilt was ALL adding borders…what it the scraps were sewn into borders…wouldn’t that be beginner friendly?!?!  In a flash I was out of the shower, dressed and at the computer drawing the design out.

I immediately sent it to Kelli and her first words were that she wasn’t going to sew it…she hated borders and essentially this entire quilt is made by sewing borders.  I was fine with that…I planned on getting our youngest daughter Kalissa roped into sewing.  She’s my non-sewer.

We used a Moda Essential Dot for the neutral between the colored borders.  It has a teal colored polka dot to it.

In between other projects when the kiddos would call I would put the phone on speaker and sort through my scraps.  Once I had a pile of scraps the next time the phone rang and it was one of my kiddos wanting to talk, I would get the scraps into 3 1/2″ segments.  Before long I had a pile of each color.

Then one day I called Kalissa.  I told her I was behind and needing help.  In true form she came to my rescue.  I told her I needed her to help me sew.  That put her in shock but she stepped up to the plate and started sewing.  She was in charge of the purple row.  She did a wonderful job.  It just so happens that Kelli was home that day and was panicking that I was letting Kalissa sew a quilt that would be in the book.

I wanted to give Kalissa confidence in her sewing.  All ended well.  We did have to have a talk or two about keeping a constant seam allowance but it all was fine despite Kelli’s panic.

I don’t have a picture of the backing but it’s extra cute.  It’s HUGE polka dots.  What’s not to love about polka dots.

This is one quilt that from the beginning Kelli didn’t love.  I always did.  In the end after it was all finished…she ended up loving it too.  The binding is all scrappy.  It was hard to decide what color to to use.  For a bit we thought red but in the end we went with teal.  After trying out a few different colors, it just looked the best.

I have a HUGE desire to make another of these only with a black background.  I think it would look so neat!  The possibilities are endless.  It would be made as a two color quilt making all the rainbow stripes the same color…It could be patriotic colors making the background white then alternating the center scrappy round making one red and one blue.

It’s a quilt we love and are so glad was in our book.

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.