Nested Churn Dash [a finish]

When I first saw the nested churn dash blocks pop up in Blogland I wasn't sure about them. It took me a while to realise that the reason I didn't like it is because the outside rings were too skinny - I'm more of a chunky girl myself! What I mean is that a traditional churn dash block is based on an even nine-patch where the length of the bars is the same as the shorter sides of the triangles in the corners. These churn dashes have long skinny bars and chunky corners.

So I ignored these blocks for a while. And then I saw this. And I was totally inspired to make my own. No single block for me - oh no! Two 24" blocks, two 16" blocks, seven 8" blocks and fourteen 4" blocks. This was a great way of using the ten minute slots I get during the day - the ten minutes between feeds, nappies and naps when my daughter is happy - cutting all the pieces, then gradually piecing all the blocks.

I pulled a huge range of fabrics from my stash for this project, starting with a half-yard bundle of hoarded Happy Mochi Yum Yum in oranges, yellows and pinks.

Some [plastic] cows helped with the photo shoot!

I also added a splash of green and an even smaller splash of bright blue. There were at least 56 different fabrics - each of the fourteen 4" blocks has four fabrics and I didn't repeat any: Kona solids, Comma, Noteworthy, Pearl Bracelets, Architextures, Tula Pink, a smattering of Art Gallery, Benartex and Riley Blake... The larger areas of negative space are Kona Maize, which is a lovely pale, but golden yellow.

The backing is possibly a polycotton, but good quality and with a pretty little flower pattern, and from a discount fabric warehouse nearby - at £6/meter I'm not complaining. Unfortunately I bought it a touch too small, so there are two pieces of leftover Happy Mochi Yum Yum pieced in.

I thought a long time over how to quilt it. Initially it was going to be an all over pattern, but because of the thousand different fabrics used, in some of the blocks the churn dash is a tad hard to spot, so to help the eye I decided to do different fmq pattern in all of the "background" areas.

Bugger - I missed a bit....can you spot it?

I had a ball quilting this one.

I really feel as though my free motion quilting has improved hugely over the last few months, and with it my confidence to try something different. Like my Neon Stained quilt, there are a few bits that I'm not in love with, but more bits that I am in love with. And the texture is gorgeous. I'm definitely a "quilt-it-densely" kind of girl! To contrast with the dense blocks, the negative area is a 3" cross hatch. I'm going to need to spend some time building my stash of threads, as I struggled to match some of the fabrics!