Project: Queen Size Quilt

This was a hefty project, to say the least. It started out PERFECTLY (as I thought). We traveled to Ohio for a family visit of sorts. My SWEET, LOVING, WONDERFUL mother sent me home with 20+ pounds of fabric…. Can you imagine the wheels turning? I was truly amazing how much she let me take home. Here are some quick pics of her sewing room:

This is NOT including her fat quarters section or her drawers sorted by colors. Amazing, right? The bolts that are pulled out are colors I liked.

This was just the FIRST layer… Our little suitcase was FILLED of JUST fabric :) I have a pretty AWESOME mom huh?

Once I was home, I decided to start a notebook to keep my designs that I've done as well as being able to plot out designs that I like (and would like to do). I bought some graph paper and a little 1" binder.

(This is the little boy pinwheel quilt I made plotted out.)

I saw this design on Pinterest (of course) but a little different (and yes, I'm going to add an outer border but I haven't gotten that far yet).

Then I became torn between this design and this one:

I think I'm going to save this one for another time. I couldn't justify doing all those nine patches. Half seemed enough. 

Anyways, I digress. So I had this design and needed to pick colors. That became hard but I decided on the nine patches being cream/white with forest greens and navy blues.

I didn't end up using ALL these colors but this was my baseline of the direction I was going. I then cut the colors into 6" squares (after I've done all the sewing and cutting to make the disappearing nine patch, it ends up being ~16" square). 

This is how I laid out all the squares- into what would be the first part of the nine patch- and then I  started to do my chain piecing/sewing- first with what would make each row:

First, I chain pieced the first two blocks (of three) in the row and then went back and chain sewed the third block to complete each row. Then, I laid them out into the block again and took the first two rows and chain sewed them together *after pressing each row accordingly towards the dark* (Chain sewing is the BEST THING EVER!- I feel like it saves so much thread).

I then pressed each nine patch before the next round of cutting began. Note: at this point I hadn't picked the color(s) for the second block in this quilt. I decided that I wanted to see what the finished disappearing nine patch looked like before I picked colors so I could get a better idea.

You cut the block in half each way...

And then flip two of the sides to get the disappearing nine patch look that I was going for. You can also make the nine patch if you want to make a quilt with sashing and little squares in the corners if you don't feel like cutting all those little squares. 

Then I started sewing them together. I laid them all out on top of each other and then sewed so that I would do it the right way (I've messed up before when I was doing the pinwheel quilt so I learned something and applied it to this next quilt.)

TA-DA! The finished nine patch. I was also able to settle on 5 colors for the second square blocks. This made a 16" finished square (and I had 21 of them).

 

 Orange with a pokadot, a light blue with a floral design, a darker blue with dots, a brown with a leaf pattern, and a solid yellow. I cut these into 9.5" squares and sashing 4" that would end up 3.5" after seam allowance so it would end up a 16" square as well (to line up with the nine patch squares). One color would need an extra square since I needed 21 of them. I sewed the short ends on first and then the long ends.

 I made sure to press seams towards the dark before sewing on the other sides.

TA-DA (again)! 

Next, I needed to lay them all out to figure out which color should go where. Thankfully, the tiles on my floor are the 16" that the blocks were so it was easy to figure out how much space I needed to have cleared. Here was the first try at it:

 

So, I had to stand on the kitchen island to get this shot. The two dark blues and the two browns were BUGGING me (A LOT) so I had my engineer husband help me out. We finally got it.

 Perfect, right? . So, here it is when I finished sewing the blocks together and then the rows together (pressing seems the opposite way in each row so they would nub together).

It's GINORMOUS! It ends up being almost a calking sized quilt. I'll post pictures when I have the backing, binding, and quilting all done (but it's going to take a little while, with it being so large).

On to my next 3 quilts!