It took me all of 2013 to make my first quilt, and another couple of months to tell you about it. Thanks to my friend Elizabeth, I managed to turn these strips of fabric:

into an amazing quilt! The idea was to use scraps of fabric I had lying around or pieces in which the contrast wasn’t good enough. Our pattern, and our theme, was Anything Goes.

We started making these squares:
   

We needed 18 squares total, here they all are:

Next we needed to cut them in half and mix it all up. It was almost color overload:

Also we made the corner pieces:

Laying it out against the background was exciting- this was where I finally started to realize I was really actually making a big quilt. I needed to pick a thin border, and this was tough. My batik pieces have a lot going on in them, so after much deliberation, and two fabric store visits, I decided to go with one non-handmade piece of fabric (the bright chartreuse). Thanks to the folks at JP Knit & Stitch, I really like the way the solid bright chartreuse color, which doesn’t exactly match any of the quilt colors, frames it.

with chartreuse border: 

Here’s the back of the quilt, a piece I did in just one color:

I’m still sometimes amazed that I made a quilt.