Reading Rainbow Quilt Finished!

I am so thrilled that I finished my Reading Rainbow quilt this weekend! It has been 10 months in the works - since we started with purple in January for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Every month I’ve added blocks of books in the color of the month according to a plan I drew out ahead of time.

The quilt was constructed with 5 12” blocks per row. Some rows, like green, orange, and yellow are all one color - because I had more of those scraps in my stash. Other rows combine colors like purple and black, red and pink, and teal and blues. And here and there I tried to add in little whimsical bits of interest; a mouse, a fishbowl, a globe, flowers, etc. All designs were pulled from my warped own imagination except that awesome Laurel Burch cat on the yellow row.

The “wood” shelves are 2” (finished) wide and the outer borders were cut at 3”. Even the back has the same Joel Dewberry woodgrain fabric, except where I had to supplement with a plain Kona gray. My husband Bruce was kind enough to haul a chair out to our colorful flowering pear tree in front. He graciously stood on the chair holding the quilt so I could snap pictures.

The finished quilt measures 66x86”. The batting is Warm & Plush cotton (my favorite), and I used a basic stipple quilting pattern. No surprise there, but there was a method to my madness. Let me show you.

The book titles were taken from fabric selvages. Most of the time, but not always, selvages are woven more tightly than the fabric itself in order to prevent fraying on the bolt. And that is one of the reasons we trim selvages - they will shrink (or not) at different rates than the main fabric. When I sewed on the selvages, I reduced my the stitches on my machine to a 1.0 length - very tiny. That doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be fraying; I fully expect that there will be fraying over the first couple washings to those seam lines.

So that’s where the stippling came in. It was another opportunity to go over the selvages with more stitches, as Alfie points out here...

And here....

And.....whoops!

It appears my Supervisor got a bit sidetracked with the camera strap ....

Now, where were we? Oh yes..... stippling. So, all in all, it seemed to make the most sense and give me the best maneuverability to get everything secured as best I could.

Reading Rainbow will be my own quilt to “read” and cuddle with this winter. It also represents a finish for the 4th Quarter 2017 Finish-Along. It is my goal #3. The link to my list is here. 

Thanks for dropping by! I will show another finish (a pink baby quilt) on my next post and catch you up with my other works in process.