A Bunch of Squares for Jerome

by Virginia J
(Gabriola Isl, BC, Canada)

Many of you will probably recognize this design, inspired by Denyse Schmidt’s full-sized quilt: What a Bunch of Squares. I had ordered her book from the library, but couldn’t wait for it to arrive before starting to work on this project, so I used pictures of quilts from the DS flickr pool to help me figure out how to make it.

First I started with squares of sand coloured fabric in 3 sizes to form the center of each block. Then I added aqua & white strips of fabric, log-cabin-style, to finish off each block. After stitching the blocks together I decided to add a subtle border in aqua (on which I embroidered baby’s name) before the large white border around the edge. It was fun quilting the random-spaced parallel lines for which I used masking tape strips as guidelines. Quilting is my favourite part of the process because that’s when the texture of the quilt comes to life. The quilt was bound in a warm, stripy, co-ordinating fabric and the back is a soft flannel print in aqua, sand, & white.

All fabrics and batting used in this quilt are 100% cotton. It’s machine-pieced and –quilted, is approximately 36 x 42”, and took about 6 hours to complete.