Unvalentine Quilt

Way back in February 2015, I had the good fortune to take Lee Heinrich’s Off the Grid class at QuiltCon. It was all about how to design quilts using alternate gridwork. I really enjoyed the class, and even finished a quilt top that day, but it was not my favorite quilt by a long shot. You see, we were told to bring a few already made blocks to class, and I made the mistake of bringing blocks that I didn’t even like.

A couple weeks before QuiltCon, I dug through my orphan blocks bin and pulled out all the extra blocks from my Perseverance Prevails quilt. Since I had already made a whole quilt out of them, I decided to cut them up and sew them back together again so that they looked a little different. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn’t like the end result, but I didn’t have time to make more blocks from scratch, so I just rolled with it. I chose to pair the blocks with a gray solid, because someone at the Seattle MQG meeting had asked if they could make their postcard swap an “unvalentine” and I wanted to play with that idea.

After I returned home from QuiltCon, I kept working on this quilt. I made a scrappy back for it and basted it in March 2015. Initially, I quilted it with straight lines in gray thread, but I really wasn’t feeling it and set the quilt aside. It languished in my WIP pile until I decided in May 2016 to suck it up and finish it. I decided to leave the quilting I had already done as is and continued with pink thread. That was a good decision. Even though I still don’t like this quilt overall, I like the look of the pink thread against the gray solid. I finished the quilting at the end of May at a Seattle MQG sew-in, and bound it in June. My goodness, am I glad to have finished this quilt! It’s my first completed quilt in 2016 and I hope it will inspire me to tackle more of my WIP pile and finish something else soon.