Must Love Purple - My Bloggers Quilt Festival Quilt

The quilt I have chosen to show for Blogger's Quilt Festival is my current favorite. (Don't we all say that about every quilt?) I think it's my favorite because it's so different from anything else I've done. And it is my favorite colors. I don't know why, but I'm drawn to cool colors.

It started as my bee quilt in August for the Sew Modern Quilt Bee. The girls did a fantastic job with the blocks they sent me. But when I had put everything together, I realized I hadn't paid close attention. These blocks are only about 7" finished. When I got all my blocks back, the quilt just wasn't big enough for me. Plus I still had a ton of scraps cut up. So I started using this quilt as my leader and ender project and now it's finally finished! And quite large - lol.

The block was one I got from this tutorial on Nittany Block Party. It has since popped up a lot all over blog land. It's fantastic for using up scraps. The only fabric that was not from my stash or scraps is the purple border. So it felt good to use up fabric I already had!

The back is the same thing, all stash. I pieced together all some of the larger pieces I had left in the right colors and of course put my label in there too.  You can also see some of the quilting I did.

I machine quilted this and used a variegated thread for the first time which was a lot of fun. It is purple, blue, green and pink. It shows up best on the solids on the back side.

I basically outlined the "X" pattern and did some straight line along the borders. I didn't want the quilting to compete with the 'busy-ness' of the x's and scraps.

Here are some close ups so you can see all the different fabrics in the blocks.

That's one of the things I like best about this. Up close, it's fun to look at all the different prints. I've never been a huge scrap quilt person, but after this, they are really growing on me! So much so that I've got 2 scrappy quilts in the works now.

Surprise, the binding is scrappy too!

Quilt stats:

Size: 70" x 70"

Pattern: X String Block

Fabrics: Mix of scraps and stash

Quilted by: Myself

Finished: 4/25/2012

As I mentioned before, this is my quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival. Welcome to any new visitors who found me through the Festival. And for those who haven't heard of it, go check it out! It's an online quilt show with lots of fantastic submissions.