This is
Aby Dolinger's Optimism 2025 BOM quilt. I very much enjoyed my first BOM. It uses mostly fabric scraps. I love the big patches and bright colors, perfect for Spring, Easter, Summer and really all-year-round. I'm keeping this one!
What fun learning how to make pentagons, chevrons, hourglass units, pieced 9-squares and cat's cradles.
I did this quilt as a QAYG. I originally wanted the flower print fabric as the outer border but the busy pattern conflicted with the main quilt body, so I ended up using it as an outer border on the backside.
Quilting each block separately was great fun, and I joined them together with sashing. I quilted the outer border with a zig-zag pattern, because the geometric pattern echoed the quilted blocks.
Shout out to
Monica Poole for her super-helpful QAYG videos, I used her "with sashing" instructions as well as her border instructions. It turns out adding a border after stitching together all the quilted squares is a bit of a challenge!
I struggle with quilting larger quilts, it requires so much upper body strength to hold and move a heavy quilt sandwich, even on my Janome HD9 (my dream machine! <3).
Finished dimensions were 58" x 78", just shy of twin-sized.
I learned a bit about the psychology of BOM quilts. I started the project restricting myself to six selected scrap fabrics in blues, yellows and white, but began running out of some fabrics as I snipped off bits for other projects throughout the year, ha.
Also I grew weary of the same old fabrics as time went on, and began adding in new colors (pink centers, green). So I'm not sure I'm the ideal BOM target audience.
The other big achievement - this was my last UFO. I have a clean slate for the rest of the year!