This year I decided to give each of my sisters a large throw quilt for Christmas. Back in January when I was choosing fabrics, it sounded like a really great idea, but then I got pregnant and didn't do anything for three months and then I decided to sew a nursery from scratch and suddenly it was November and two quilts for Christmas seemed like an insane idea.
Part of the time crunch was due to the fact that I decided to hand quilt them. I've done a few quilts on my machine now, and I like the speed and ease of it, but to me, the hand-stitching is so much more special. Also a lot more time-consuming. But! I finished them both just in the nick of time and I'm very excited to share.
In my rush to finish the quilts, I didn't get a chance to take pictures, and I was distracted with other things after Christmas, so my sister took these for me the night before she left.
This one is for my sister Cara, who lives entirely too far away in Oregon. I chose fabrics that were what I think of as "Oregon colors": blues, greens, grays. The background is Kona Ash, my new favorite background color.
The two quilts are very different (I'll be sharing the other one soon) but I tried to keep a few unifying elements between them. Both have Kona Ash as the background, both have the same design on the backs, both have multi-colored stitching, and both use triangle-based designs. This one is a rad herringbone pattern I saw on Flickr ages ago and that stuck with me all this time.
The backs of both quilts are similar as well. On each I used mostly Kona Ash with a patchwork strip of fabrics from the front to break it up.
For the quilting, I stitched around each of the light grey pieces. I used size 8 perle cotton in various shades of blue, green, and grey. It's a pretty subtle effect unless you're really close to the quilt, but I was very happy with how it came out.
The finishing touch, as always: a short + sweet embroidered message. This time I forgot to do this part until the quilts were all done! Embroidering on a bound quilt is much harder than embroidering on an unquilted backing.
Appropriately, I bound it with Joel Dewberry's herringbone print in navy. A perfect match.
I'm Leah. I love making pretty things with fabric, paper, and sometimes, pixels and fonts. These days, though, it's mostly fabric. I also love tv on dvd and sometimes I talk about my cats too much. I live in Alexandria, VA, with my husband Chris and our son Joey, who was born on Christmas Eve last year. Chris is a musician in The US Army Band "Pershing's Own", and I make 
