Interleave Fun!

Hi Bloggers!

It's Blogger's Quilt Festival, so it's time for my annual blog post :) Life has been busy but I did have a bit of time to quilt last spring. This quilt has a fun origin story.  Sometime last year, my mother in law came over and asked me if I knew of any good quilt shops.  I told her I did and she said she wanted to go see if any of them were selling any of the quilts they had on display.  I was like, "Umm....I can make you a quilt."  Bless her heart, she gave me carte blanche on basically everything about this quilt (as well as a nice little check so I could go buy fabric) :)

I had recently been looking online at interleave quilts by Lorrie Cranor.  She has some instructions for how to make some fun little ones out of fat quarters.  I tried that out, figured out some techniques that would scale a little better for me, designed it in inkscape, redesigned it in inkscape a few more times, finally found a design I liked, made a few mock-ups and started sewing.  

This was a serious labor of love and it took a bit longer than I anticipated to put it together.  I though it would be easier since it's technically a quilt as you go with all straight lines and I didn't have to figure out how to finish/quilt it.  But putting that much bulk through my machine (even with its bigger-than-average throat size) got to be a little bit of a wrestling match at times.  

This is a full size quilt and measures approximately 80 x 86.  There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 172 or 173 strips altogether---each 1/2 inch finished.  And, as you can see if you look closely, this quilt was constructed with all straight lines.  Any curves you see are an optical illusion.  Cool, huh?

Thanks for letting me share my quilt with you!  Hope you're all enjoying all the amazing Blogger's Quilt Festival quilts!