Spectrum

Last year I took a break from my Christmas quilting to finish a wall quilt not on my WIP list. I'd picked up the Kona Color Chart panel on clearance, and the finished quilt helps me more accurately pick colors now when I have to order a solid to finish an ongoing project. The bonus is I love looking at the wide range of colors!

Now I've done it again with Hoffman's batik color sampler. I thought the Kona solids were cool... oh, man, am I ever in love now!!!


This was one of my favorite quilting projects of all time, not only because, as my dear friend Mrs. Micawber says, I've never met a batik I didn't like, but also because the color names were so much fun as I straight-line quilted past each one!


The unbound quilt was hanging on my living room quilt rack when my little 8-year-old neighbor came over to work on her Eiffel Tower quilt, and she was equally entertained by the color names. She spent the next hour and a half picking out names for my future cats from the colorful list. Why not? She has a little dog named...


And she knows all too well my dear husband's nickname...


Some of the color names make me scratch my head, while others make me giggle. Some of the color names make me feel the color.










Initially, I had planned to bind the quilt with black strips I cut myself, but by the time I got done quilting, I was batik-addicted once again. I cut strips from 30 of the hand-dyes in my stash, which has been nearly decimated in the last two years, which means, eventually, I'm going to have to stock up again. Oh, darn!!! Boy, is this color chart going to come in handy!!!

I measured the circumference of the unbound quilt, and Lizard helped me with the math. He came up with 5.4 inches of each strip to make a long enough binding. That seemed awful short to me, but I trusted his computations and cut six-inch lengths of each color before stitching my binding together. I didn't have much more than six inches of some of my most favorite colors, and other color remnants are only 10 to 12 inches long. Yes, I'm definitely going to have to do some shopping again. But not until I finish a few more quilts. I promise.










The binding was a lot of work, but it is SO worth it!


The binding ended up being too long, and I'm still not quite sure how that happened. It had to be me adding half an inch to each 5.4 inches I needed (you know, for seams), not Lizard's calculations. I had to remove seven colors. Had I pinned the binding on before attaching it, I would have picked different colors to eliminate. Ha ha! That will teach me.






The best part is I have enough leftovers to bind two or three more quilts. I've got several ideas in my head for striping, and no two will be alike because I've completely run out of a few colors. And the leftover triangles... oh, will those be fun!!!


I may do this exact same panel again one day, but with a large border so it can be a lap quilt. Who needs to watch TV if you can cuddle up in these color samples and dream of future projects?!?


I may have to do a third one, too, because I've seen that some people made their samplers into bags. I would proudly carry a bag made from this panel, and I think I'd free-motion quilt some fun designs into each color because the samples are so small, it would be easy to move the quilt around on the sewing machine.

This wall quilt has left me longing to work with batiks again. I can't help but yearn to finish up a specific WIP after finishing this fun project...


Linking up with Busy Hands Quilts, Crazy Mom Quilts and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

Tweet

Pin It