New Quilt - Birch Illusions

So far, so good in 2015.  In I See a Pattern Here, I talked about getting energized after filling the envelopes on my To-Do List quilt.  I also showed four similar patterns, and decided to make one of them.

Nine days after that post and I have a new quilt.  That's fast for me.  

It's 16.5" x 40".  I had to downsize it from the pattern to make it fit a narrow niche that I was going to hang it in.  I did some math and figured that cutting the strips at 2" instead of 2.5" would work perfectly.  Well, it worked perfectly for one direction, but not the other because of a different number of seams.  Of course, I didn't discover this until most of the pieces were cut out.

As it turns out, I decided to hang this quilt in another location, so I could have gone with the pattern's measurements after all.

Illusions is the pattern I used.  It was more complicated than I thought, and even though the directions and illustrations were excellent, I still managed to goof up and had to do some rework.

I named my quilt Birch Illusions because the fabric reminds me of a Birch tree, and Illusions is the name of the pattern.

Before I did any cutting, I auditioned several layouts.  Abstractly, the quilt has white sashing around two squares, and two intersecting lines.  So I laid out the fabric like this to get a quick visual impression and then took photographs to see which of them I liked the best.

This was one of my rejects. 

Another try, another reject.  

Ditto.  I also tried about 15 other combinations.  

The winner, clearly showing my three favorite colors (orange, teal, and green).  Even though the inner square sort of disappears at times because of the grey/white leaves, it adds to the illusionary nature of the quilt.  The same thing happened with the dotted fabric for the binding - you can see that in some areas you can't even see the dots, just white space.

For the quilting, I did echo stitching.  

I used up I'm-tired-of-these fabrics from my stash on the back.  Part of the quilt was made with a strip set, and I turned the leftover piece into my label.

Boy, that was fun.  The more I sew, the more I want to sew.  Tomorrow I'll start another something new.