SherylM

Thank you for all of the compliments. This quilt, more than any other quilt I've made, has truly been a labor of love. The pattern is called Unique Batik and it's from the book String Quilts : 11 Fun Patterns for Innovating and Renovating by Elsie M. Campbell. I got it on Amazon.

Long story, how I came to make this one...I'll try for the Reader's Digest version. No promises though.

Two years ago, my daughter and son-in-law and the two kiddos, who live in California, came to visit us (I'm in Michigan.) I asked her to pick out some fabrics because I wanted to make her a quilt. I had bought some Tula Pink fat quarters from her Tabby Road collection because my daughter loves cats, and those were some of the fabrics that she chose, among others.

She had told me that she wanted a string quilt so I had a copy of Mary Hogan's book sent to her, and told her that when I was ready, she could pick out a pattern. Fast forward to this summer...I told her I was ready to start on her quilt and to pick out a pattern.

Well, she couldn't find the book - evidently it was a casualty of a bookcase purge. So she went on Amazon, bought another (different) book, and picked out this pattern. I loved the pattern and didn't want to tell her to pick out a different one, but the problem was that it was designed for several gradated colors of batiks and the fabrics that she'd picked out just weren't going to work. Plus...pandemic, so there was no way I was going to go to a quilt shop to buy 36+ different colors of batiks, not to mention the expense.

I was crying on my friend's shoulder about all of this when she said, "You might hate me for this, but why don't you dye the fabric yourself?" I already had a whole bolt of solid white fabric so I figured, why not? Anyhow, it all turned out better than I expected and I learned several new things, one of them being that I love dyeing fabric!

I've decided that I'll probably go ahead and take the suggestions to SITD around the diamond shapes. If the quilt was just for me I would throw caution to the wind and do the channel quilting, but I don't want to take a chance on this one ever doing anything weird.

I understand that when the batting package says that you can quilt it up to 8" apart, that means both ways. On one blog that I read, the lady said that she's channel quilted several children's quilts 1.5" apart and they've held up just fine through many washes. I don't know what kind of batting she was using though, and I would want to go farther apart than that.

But I really do love the look of channel quilting, so I've decided that I'm going to make a couple of large samples with leftover wool and leftover cotton batting. I'll channel quilt them about 2.5 - 3" apart and throw them in the washer and dryer several times to see how they hold up.