Gold 'n Green Gemstone Throw Quilt

Sunday, October 17, 2021

It's been awhile since I've made a quilt, but I have completed this pandemic wedding throw quilt for my sister and her new husband. It took about 9 months, and ended up getting completed several months after the wedding, but hey I got there in the end! According to wedding etiquette, you can send a wedding gift up to a year after the event itself and not be considered late, so...there!

My inspiration was this Sunset Quilt by AQuiltIsNice which was in turn inspired by this mini-quilt from Cortney Heimerl, but I changed up the color scheme to be less feminine (and to match the couple's living room decor). This one, like all quilts, required a bit of math to work out the sizing, quantities, total amount of fabric, etc. And as always, I did not purchase enough at the beginning and had to buy more fabric. But the design required different shades of greens and gray, so it was no matter that the background light grays aren't necessarily a perfect match, either.

Ah, but you haven't even seen the best yet. I mean, the quilt top is a perfect mix of modern and traditional, while being rather straight-forward to assemble. But I'd been inspired awhile back by paper-pieced gemstone quilts on Pinterest, and since I'm no stranger to paper-pieced quilt appliques, I thought gemstones would make a perfect personalized adornment for the back of the quilt. Modern, but a little less traditional. Two quilts in one, another one of my favorite approaches!

The patterns came from Andrea Tsang Jackson's Patchwork Lab: Gemology: Transforming Fabrics into Facets. They're not really beginner quilt work, but they are gorgeous. At first I thought I'd only make one or two, but then I just kept going...

And then I had five differently colored, sized, and shaped gemstone appliques in variously coordinating fabrics. Except for maybe the cushion ruby gemstone, but whatever. There's some pink in the couple's living room. You gotta live a little. I also opted to arrange the gemstones in a sort of "tumbling" arrangement. For these things it's best to be a little random, as it'll cover imperfections (i.e., no need to perfectly align/orient anything!).

The backing fabric was a serendipitous find at JoAnn Fabrics. I don't typically purchase quilt-sized fabric for my quilt backings, often preferring to do a scrappy back instead. However, the hand-drawn diamonds in gray of this fabric really was perfectly matched to my plans.

I ended up machine quilting diamond/square shapes into the quilt, keeping my seams mostly in the light gray background triangles. This results in a series of concentric squares on point, that mimic the quilt back fabric. I also opted to alternate the quilting thread between gray and dark green for some added interest.

You may also barely be able to make out some hand-quilting that's in the middle diamond of the quilt top. That's the couple's wedding date. Less noticeable on the back, but you can still sort of perceive something funky's going on in the middle! The plan for this personalization also helped inform the tumbling arrangement of the gemstones - there was no way I want to hand quilt through one of these appliques!

Overall, I'm very, very pleased with how this quilt came out. I think it's a real gem ;)