Tuesday, August 02, 2016

Niece #3's Graduation Quilt


My third niece graduated from high school in 2014, and by that Christmas I was starting to feel that I should do something about getting a start on her graduation quilt.  On Christmas afternoon I asked her some questions about preferences, colors, and so on.  Then I holed myself up for awhile with the internet, and gathered a bunch of images of quilts that seemed related to what she had described, saving them on a Pinterest page.  That night, she gave me the thumbs-up and thumbs-down on that little virtual quilt collection, leaving me with a set of nine that she liked. 

Looking at these, I decided to try again with a concept I used, not terribly successfully I think, in a wedding quilt a few years ago: mottled blues and whites in a grey lattice.


This time, I would put the lattice on the normal ordinal orientation -- squares instead of diamonds -- and not try to get cute with the shading of the lattice.  I'd try to get away from a single big monolithic pattern.  And, I'd try to see how far I could get from blue, and still have it be basically a blue and white quilt.

So, I cut a whole lot of squares:


And started arranging them, mostly randomly:


The further you get in assembling this kind of quilt -- unless you've planned it all out from the beginning (which sounds like it would be better, but in some ways gives you less control over the final product) -- the more you have to make decisions about how the various pieces are going to sit relative to each other.


Anyway, eventually you sew everything together and there you are.  In this case, there I was on December 20 of last year, just in time to stuff that sucker in a box and make it a twofer graduation/Christmas gift.  It's the thought that counts.


Honestly, it's one of my favorites of the quilts I've made.

The Specs

Title: "Niece #3's Graduation Quilt"  
Serial Number: 75

Dimensions: 95" x 66"
Batting: Commercial batting from recycled plastic bottles.
Backing: Strips of solid flannels.  Didn't get a picture, apparently. 

Quilting: Following the lattice frame.

Begun: Christmas 2014
Finished: Just in time for Christmas 2015

Intended Use/Display: Blanket.

Provenance: In use, as far as I know.