Sew Joy: May Rainbow Quilt

Remember May? Yeah, that was only last month! I haven't shared all my photos yet of the quilt that my daughter and I made that month. The whole quilt, from start to finish, in one month!

We made Pat Sloan's Magical Quilty May Rainbow half square triangle quilt!

The pattern is still free from Pat - visit this post to download it.

My daughter was home from university for the month and we decided to make a quilt together. Pat Sloan was providing a free quilt pattern for quilters and I knew I wanted to make it. I have been working on using up my current stash and a rainbow quilt is a great way to cut into fabrics and use up a whole bunch of pieces. My daughter sewed all of the half square triangles (hsts). I did the rest! HA!

She used my Kenmore machine set up beside the PFAFF performance icon that I'm using right now for my QUILTsocial posts. You can read about it here :)

I loved making this quilt with my daughter! Once we got the rainbow part done, we looked through my supplies on hand (also known as stash and quilt tops) to find a backing. She remembered that this Aurifil block of the month sampler was suppposed to be for her when she graduated grade 8?!. . .

It was decided that we would use the sampler for the backing which meant adding on to the rainbow top to make it bigger. I again went into my supplies (this time fabrics that were being saved for something special) and brought out some yardage of Molly's Garden. I was saving it to finish the baby sampler that I'd made by hand when I was pregnant with my daughter. She loves the fabric and wants to include it on this quilt!

Of course I'm game! I really want to use up what I have and knowing she likes this fabric makes it an easy decision. Now I decide I need to make double sided binding because this chosen fabric doesn't go well with the sampler quilt. I used this tutorial from the Pattern Basket and am pretty pleased with the results.

She loves the fabric so much, in fact, that she wanted to make pillows with it too!

I like this photo because you can see the quilting I did - a very easy serpentine stitch on the diagonal. I used a built in stippling stitch on the performance icon and increased its length.

Now my daughter has a happy rainbow quilt. This photo is of the quilt on her bed here at home with her loving cat. In her apartment the quilt has prime location in her living room on her arm chair.