The June Bride - Part 5

When last I wrote about this project I was contemplating what to do with the magenta and off-white album block.  (You can see the starting block in this post from March) The 24x24 inch quilt is almost ready to ship off to Dorry. I'm calling it Strawberry Fields Forever.

The design is my own variation on the traditional Double Wedding Ring pattern. I made one set of rings narrower in plain white, and the other is slightly wider, in three shades of green.

Here's an angled look at it in the afternoon sun so the quilting shows up better.

The darkest of the green fabrics that makes up the rings was one I believe I won as a "free" bonus with a purchase of fabric on the internet. It was a cheery shade of green and had both the magenta of the Album block and the blue required by the challenge.

Obviously, I did cut up the album block.  I figured out that cutting it into 25 pieces, they would wind up the right size to fit in the shapes between the arcs of the 12-inch rings.  But my design needed 32 pieces. Dorry provided us with an off-white fabric that closely matched the muslin of the vintage blocks, but only one of my 25 pieces would be plain muslin. I had saved a bit of gift-package ribbon of the right color that I used on top of 16 of the square pieces, then used those in a regular 4-patch distribution. Some of those squares are almost entirely pink, even though I only covered about half of any block - I didn't have enough of the ribbon to do much more, and I melted some of it trying to iron it on the normal high setting I use for quilting cotton.

I knew the cut up block partially covered in ribbon would wind up in a crazy-patch look, not my favorite, but this after all is a challenge and a chance to try something I normally wouldn't do.  I decided it reminded me a little of Victoria Findlay Wolfe's Best of Show quilt at the first Modern Quilt show (QuiltCon), Double Edged Love and I went for it.  (The link is to Victoria's blog entry about her win.)

This was a difficult piecing job and not one of my better ones, but now I'd like to make a "real" Double Wedding Ring quilt some day (maybe soon?) with scrap fabrics for the traditional wedges that make up the rings. I'll buy the plastic templates for that though!