Finish: Mod Pop

One of my goals for 2012 was to try a quilt-a-long, but it took me a while for my free time to match up with a QAL that I was interested in. Fortunately, Leanne at she can quilt decided to host a QAL for the Mod Pop quilt pattern at just the right time, and I had totally fallen in love with the pattern, so I decided to join in. As an added bonus, I’d also vowed to tackle curves in 2012, so I’d have that off my list as well!

I knew I wanted to do something with navy, because I have really been loving that color but hadn’t had a chance to do any projects with it at that point. (Now of course I have 4 projects recently finished that used navy and I’m ready to move on, I swear!) But what to go with it? Then I remembered that my personal trainer (Bill)’s favorite color is navy blue, and I realized I really owed him a Christmas present since he’s also a friend and trains me for free (!!!), and it all came together.

Bill’s other favorite colors are white/grey so I decided I would use that as my color scheme. But then it came down to whether I wanted to do the design as grey on navy or navy on grey. And wow I tried a lot of different visualization methods to figure out which I’d like better.

After a lot of feedback (thanks everyone!) I decided to go with navy on grey, and I’m really glad I did. I think if I had more navy tonals (instead of mostly white on navy) I would have been happy with the navy in the background, but I don’t have them, so I’m glad I went with the grey background. Because there’s not a lot of contrast in the greys, it tends to blend together and get out of the way and let the chains really pop.

Once the top was done, it sat for over a month as I figured out what to do with the back. I had a lot of curved pieces leftover (I actually STILL have some leftover… maybe I should have bothered trying to count what I needed..) so I decided to do a reverse chain–more out of curiosity of how it would look than any real design focus. Then I surrounded it with two different navy solids (the darker is Cotton Couture in Indigo, and the lighter is Kona Nautical) and called it done.

I tried a few different things for the quilting, but in the end I liked the look of the simple echo quilting the best. I didn’t want the quilting to be too dense, because I wanted it to have a lot of drape. While strong-arming the quilt through my poor machine, I had dreams of getting a long-arm. I don’t really NEED a car, right??

Finally, the quilting done, it was time to pick binding! I knew I wanted to do lime green to pick up the pops of it in that showed up in a number of the navy fabrics, but also because Bill’s partner’s favorite color is green. After pulling about 10 bolts of different green fabrics at Intrepid Thread‘s new physical store (yay!), I went with my first instinct which was V and Co’s lime green ombre in the Simply Color line. The ombre is fairly subtle as a binding, but I really am happy with how it comes together, and it really pops with those dark navies on the back!

There are a lot of imperfections in this quilt (including one “humility block” which is rotated the wrong way) but I really love the way it looks now that it’s finished. I gifted it to Bill yesterday and I’m happy to say that he absolutely loved it! There are a lot of fabrics in the quilt that are little nods to his tastes and inside jokes, and I’m really pleased I was able to finish it!

This was the biggest quilt I’ve completed to date. Maybe next year I’ll dare a queen?!

Quilt stats:
Design: Mod Pop – pattern by Julie @ Distant Pickles
Dimensions: Twin sized – 60″ x 80″
Fabrics: So many. I believe there are 23 different navy fabrics, and 27 different white/grey fabrics, but I lost count at some point.
Humility block location: Lower left corner

And a few close-ups from before it was washed!

-Anne