Hey there!  I never really know how to start out and I feel like my standard Happy Friday Friends is getting old.  How about we just consider yourself officially welcomed and we move on 🙂

Today I thought I would share a super fun quilt I finished recently.  In fact this quilt is quite possibly the craziest quilt I’ve ever made.

You see while I consider myself a modern quilter I tend to lean towards the traditional side when it comes to a very planned and controlled layout.  I usually like things very neat and orderly (much like my “real” life).  I most often choose a very planned out color scheme and intentional block layout.

However…you can see that I threw all of that out the window this time!  There are literally no two pieces that “match” or look the same anywhere on this entire quilt.

Every month I attend a “Free Spirit Club” class and my little local quilt shop.  The class is meant as an improv, scrappy style class.  Hence the name Free Spirit.  I signed up for the year long class in an attempt to get out of my comfort zone and try new things.

This quilt was from January’s class and was the main reason I signed up in the first place.  I saw the store display and fell in love.  Like most quilters I have a TON of scraps and I wanted to use them for this darling crazy quilt.  The pattern is actually called Yarn Bomb Trees and finishes approximately 50″ x 60″.  I added the additional white border and the pieced outer border to make my quilt a bit larger.  Every piece of fabric you see came from my scrap bins except the backing.  That is a Pottery Barn Kids duvet cover that I cut up.  I fell in love with the crazy colored flowers and knew it would be perfect for this quilt.

The quilt itself was easy to piece and SO much fun.  I really wanted to actually finish before the next month’s class so I Free Motion quilted it on my domestic machine.  First I stitched “in the ditch” around each of the square blocks and along the white outer border.

Then I went in and added Free Motion quilted paisleys in each of the tree blocks.  For the inner white border I quilted a series of connected diamonds.

The diamonds in the corners didn’t match up exactly since my quilt was a unusual size but in the spirit of throwing caution to the wind I decided to leave them as is and move on.

You can see a bit of both the FMQ paisleys and the diamonds in this photo.  Plus my tiny little label 🙂

I had quite a bit of FMQ practice with this quilt and LOVED every minute of it!!  Yes it takes some time and extra practice but it really is SO much fun!

My 15 year old son helped me with the photos and he was dying for me to get this shot.  It’s kind of fun but resulted in a dirty quilt that needed to be washed ASAP.  Not a problem and we was pretty happy to “direct” this shot 🙂

I used solid black for the binding as I didn’t want anything to take away from all the fun colors in the quilt itself.  Lately I’ve been obsessed with big stitch hand quilting on the binding.  I used white Pearl Cotton DMC brand thread in size 8 with a good heavy duty embroidery needle.  You can usually find it at your local big box type fabric or craft store.

If you’d like more information about this pattern you can see the designers website at Aunt Ems Quilts

Her finished quilt looks a bit different than mine but it’s that the best part of quilting anyway.  Taking a pattern or a group of fabrics and putting our own spin on it.  Making something we love and having a good time.

So that’s it for today.  I hope Spring is starting to visit you wherever you are and that you have a chance to get outside and enjoy it 🙂