Anniversary quilt

Ever since I made my first quilt right before Audrey was born, I've been wanting to do a bigger one for our bed. Making a quilt to commemorate our wedding anniversary seemed appropriate, and the sixteenth anniversary was a logical choice, since a square quilt will nicely cover our king-size bed, and a completion goal of May 2011 would give me plenty of time for the ambitious tasks of piecing a large quilt by machine and then quilting it by hand.

Back at the end of December, I started sketching. My color palettes (warm tones of orange and yellow, and cool tones of blue and purple) were inspired by some of my favorite flowers: lilacs, hyacinths, hydrangeas, irises, poppies and marigolds. After repeated rearranging and several designs I scrapped completely, I came up with the sketch above.

It's the same arrangement of pieces as the squares in Audrey's quilt, but the colors are grouped to create a completely different design, and the sashing and borders are also different.

The middle sixteen squares are surrounded by a modified "piano key" border, which will be made from 1" x 4" strips of fabric from the same palette sewn together but in random order.

Outside of that is an 8" border I had originally intended to be contrast fabric (a fabric that picked up all the colors from both my palettes), but after some browsing online, I realized it was going to be virtually impossible to find a fabric with all those colors (or even most of them) together. So I looked in some art books and online at Aztec and Mayan textiles and stonework, and came up with a sort of "Aztec key" design that I could plot out in 1" squares of fabric for a mosaic effect that would accomplish the same purpose as the contrast fabric.

On the very outside, I added another 4" piano key border to bring the quilt's dimensions to 96 square inches, which should cover my bed nicely.

For the past six months I've been collecting fabrics here and there, and just this week I got my final piece. Now the fun starts!