Made for a friend whose wardrobe has a definite slant towards flannel plaid, I wanted to represent the blend of colours to give some cozy comfort without actually using plaid. I drew up a pattern, making sure it was big enough so that I wouldn’t have to deal with itty bitty pieces. As it is, the yellow strip is only 1″ wide.

I used different fabrics, trying to match how the colours change when they overlap in a plaid pattern. The most difficult to find was where blue overlaps with yellow; I did not want to end up using a green, and was fortunate enough to find fabric that seemed to maintain distinct blue and yellow. I wanted a little bit of the back to show in the front, so chose the red as a binding (spoiler!).

It was quilted free-hand, attempting to emulate a wood-grain pattern. Sometimes they look more like waves, but for a first-time free-hand quilter, I’m not complaining. I was also listening to music and dancing while quilting so that probably contributed to the… waviness.

    In the big white squares between the plaid, I wanted something simple to keep the attention on the plaid. So I chose to do straight vertical and horizontal lines for three of them.

And a surprise for the fourth! Can you tell what it is?

You can see it better from the back….

    Surprise!

I wanted to make the back interesting, if not reversible. The moose is appliquéd on. It was the first thing quilted, and we had to be a little creative in how to roll the quilt onto the long-arm once that part was done. The rest of the back was quilted in a light grey so the wood-grain is a lot more obvious.

Hopefully next time there will be some in-progress photos, but for now just bear with my excess of finished pictures. I suppose once I have made a lot more quilts, I will be more blasé about it, but for now I am pleased as punch.

There have been mumblings of turning my scratched out plans into a real pattern in case anyone was interested, but that will be a while coming.

Thanks for reading!

Stéphanie