Traditional Modern

A few months ago, I read about a new quilt along. I hadn't participated in one before, but this one struck me a bit differently. I've never taken a quilting class and, quite honestly, knew very little about traditional blocks when I first started quilting. I mostly just started putting fabrics together and sewing. While I'm not a traditionalist, it's nice to at least be familiar with traditional blocks. No need to reinvent the wheel type thing. I've been checking out books on quilting from the library and looking at traditional blocks for the past several months. Then I read about the modify tradition quilt along. I liked the idea of actually making several traditional blocks for a quilt.

My grandmother was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and is going through chemotherapy. I had already planned to make her a quilt, so one with a bit more traditional bent seemed perfect.

I'm not precise, with anything really, so traditional blocks are quite a challenge. It just seems like a lot of no-fun work to cut fabrics to a certain size, sew, iron, trim, sew more, iron, trim again. Ugh, I guess I'm just too lazy for precise work. As I was working on this quilt, I thought I might end up hating it. Though I liked the fabrics I chose and liked them together, I liked them less in the blocks. It just didn't seem to be working. A couple of the blocks I ended up not using, because I really didn't like them at all. The nine patch just seemed really boring at a 12.5" block. After putting the blocks together, things started to improve, and I ended up loving the quilt after quilting it. Since this was a sampler quilt, I decide to make the quilting a "sampler" of sorts, each block was quilted slightly differently. I am kicking myself for not getting better photos, especially of the quilting, but you can kind of see the quilting from the back of the quilt in these photos. (I'm going to toot my own horn here, the quilting is really pretty, despite my cruddy photos. I must get better at taking photos of my quilts. I have no idea what I was doing this day. )

The backing is a pale yellow cotton, with a strip of the orange with blue dots from the front.

I doubt that I will work on a sampler quilt with traditional blocks again. This way of working just didn't fit my personality well. Of course, if I had made the blocks as the quilt along progressed, rather than one after another I might have liked it more.