Finally getting started

I've been planning to make a quilt for the goddaughter for, oh, 7 months now. I got most of the stuff a few months ago, like in April, and cut some pieces sometime after that. Yesterday, I finally started sewing some of them together. It's going to be a roman stripe pattern. It's an Amish pattern of pinwheels made of half striped triangles, half solid. I've made this pattern a couple of times before. The stripes are made of five different solid fabrics, and the solid is traditionally black or navy. The pattern is from Quick Quilts to Make in a Weekend. It's all strip-pieced, and the pieces are fairly large. The finished size is about 5 feet square, which is great for a lap quilt. I was actually thinking of making one for myself in shades of blue, eventually. The stripes for the current one are three different shades of purple, hot pink, and baby pink, with navy blue as the solid. The narrow border (a traditional feature of Amish quilts that I quite like) is a medium lavender, and the same fabric as the middle stripe. The outer border is more of the navy. I don't know if I have enough of the navy fabric to do the back in all navy, too. I was going to get a little bit of a patterned fabric, and insert that as a medallion on the back. Or, I may go back to Hobby Lobby and get another yard of navy blue Kona cotton, one of the two.

I'm piecing the quilt by machine, but I'm going to quilt it by hand, and I'm going to do more hand quilting than I have ever done before. I'm going to quilt diagonal lines through all of the pinwheel squares, and I want to find a quilting template to make a pattern in the border. I'm kind of thinking flowers. The batting I got is a needled cotton batting, and it has to be quilted every 4 inches.

I started looking at other Amish patterns online, and I found another one I want to make at some point. It's a pattern of squares, in an almost starburst design. It's basically concentric diamonds of alternating colors radiating out from a central square. The one I saw had a narrow border, a really wide, probably 12-inch outer border with contrasting corner squares. I think that's going to be the next quilt I make.