Picnic Quilt Top

I have been working on this quilt top since March, when we had our first glimpse of spring weather, unfortunately things have not progressed on the weather front, but I finally finished the quilt top.  I would have finished a couple of weeks ago but the loss of my machine also stripped me of my sewing mojo.  A kind friend lent me her machine and while it felt much better to have a machine in the house I was not hugely motivated to sew.  My machine is now back and so is the mojo, which is a good thing as I have a rather large to do list at the moment.

This quilt was inspired by a quilt of Rita's from red pepper quilts.  I originally planned on making it random in colour layout like Rita's, but my husband saw it all laid out on the floor (ready to sew after hours of arranging) and said it was too crazy colourful.  His exact words were "it looks like someone has already chucked up on it!".  So I reorganised the blocks into a rainbow like arrangement, which I equally love, in an attempt to tone it down.  Perhaps I will make random layout quilt once I accumulate more scraps.

We have a very old woollen blanket that has seen better days.  I thought it would make a great batting for a picnic quilt so the quilt top is sized to fit that.  As you can see this is another scraps quilt.  I have really been enjoying working with scraps and lots of colour this year.   I cut each strip a 1/4" extra long so I had room to trim up the blocks (tip from Rita at red pepper quilts), this really helped to have square blocks which made the final piecing really easy. With lots of careful pinning almost all of my corners are matched.  Each strip was cut 6 3/4" x 2 1/2", to leave me with a 6 1/2" x 6 1/2" block once trimmed.

In hindsight their was probably to much work in the piecing for a picnic quilt.   Especially one that is going to be quite well used (abused) by my 3 young girls.  But I have come thus far, so hopefully in the near future (before summer is over) we will be picnicking on a finished quilt.