Granny Square Banner Quilt

 

Final Stats

Name: Granny Square Banner Quilt

Dimensions: 84" x 84"

Pieces: Front - 441

Pattern: Variation on the Banner Plus Block 

Technique: Patchwork

Materials: 100% Quilting Cottons

Quilting: Machine quilted on my Juki

 

So this quilt started out as part of my DCMQG 2016 QAL (which will get finished at some point, when I'm not wrangling a newborn). I loved this particular variation on Block 7 so much, that I wanted to turn it into a quilt. So when one of my best friends, and college room mate, told me she'd gotten some bad news about her health, I decided to make a quilt for her to cheer her up and wrap her in some love, like quilters tend to do. I asked her what her favorite colors were, and the answer was blue and purple. So I pulled every fabric scrap I had in those colors, plus my low volumes, and proceeded to bang out 9 28" blocks, while my hubby and son were visiting family in Michigan.

 

The very center square is black and all the other center squares are a dark blue. I guess there's supposed to be some symbolism there about coming out of darkness and what not. I spent some time arranging the various pieces to my satisfaction and then also spent some time moving around the finished blocks. I had bought a bunch of purple backing, because I was making this quilt and another quilt (post coming soon), and both were blue and purple. And because I was trying to finish this quilt rather quickly, I also just wanted something easy. For the quilting, I did a free motion box-in-box pattern, which is more "boxy" in parts than in others. The benefits of the pattern are that its fast and I don't really have to worry about accidentally running over already quilted portions, because I just turn it into yet another box.

 

For the binding I used some of the leftover blue bike path fabric from Eric's Pixel Michigan quilt. I machine bound it, because well, it's faster and I hate hand binding. Generally by the time I get to the binding, I just want to be done already and get the quilt out of my house (or on my bed). One load of laundry and lots of Shout color catchers later, and I had a finished, folded quilt to gift to my friend. All told, this quilt took me just under two weeks. I finished it right before my guild's March 2016 quilting retreat.