Spring Thaw Quilt

One of the first activities my quilt guild (Knoxville Modern Quilt Guild) does every year is set quilting/sewing/creative goals. We pull them out at our holiday party in December to see how well we did and how much we accomplished. One of my goals this year is to blog at least once a month. I missed January -- great start! -- but I've decided to just double up in February to make up for it. I have a bunch of finished quilts and other projects that I haven't shared here, so I should have enough content to make it through the rest of the year. Even if a lot of people don't see these posts, I like having the record of what I've made.

Every year, I set a goal of making more quilts and things from the books and magazines I've collected. This pattern, called Spring Thaw, was designed by Jodi Nelson and appears in the March/April 2015 issue of Quilty magazine.

I started this quilt in 2018, but years before, I won a fat quarter bundle of Sweetwater "Noteworthy" fabric from an online fabric shop. It turns out that 42 fat quarters go a loooooong way, and this is the second pretty large quilt I've made using that bundle. AND I still have some fabric left that could become yet another quilt. Here's the first one, made using a quilt-as-you-go method and donated to Project Linus for a teen in need:

I started out making a twin-size quilt like the one in the pattern, but when it was on my design wall and the bottom rows were cascading down onto the floor, I started to wonder why I was making it so large. So I removed some rows and columns and it finished around 51 x 64. I found the rose-colored backing fabric on the clearance shelves of a local quilt shop, and the longarm quilting was done by local quilter Pat Pike. Since I didn't have a plan for this quilt -- it wasn't made for anyone in particular or for me to keep -- I decided to see how aqua quilting thread turned out. I like it a lot -- it's playful and a good fit for the overall design.

I started this back in 2018 and finished it in 2019 -- feels great to finally have it done! Now it just needs a home... Quilt for sale! Quilt for sale!