The Beauty of a Scrap Quilt

 I love this quilt.  (Don't worry if you don't ...)  And I want to tell you why I love it so much.  A lot of it has to do with how it feels.  Trust me - it's going to be a great quilt for a chilly day.  This is 60" x 75" - perfect for napping or reading.

The big reason I love this quilt is that I have used some of my scraps.  I joke about my scraps having scraps, but it's true.  So to make something useful out of little bits is satisfying.

I love this quilt for the setting of what were originally 12" blocks.  To give the quilt unity and help the eye make sense, I used the Attic Windows settings.  The pane on the left side of each block is from a fabric I found in New Zealand.  There are little kiwis hidden amongst the leaves. With the addition of the attic windows side and bottom pane, each block became 15.25" by 15.25" 

Sew the two kiwis in the left panel above?

 Another reason I love this quilt is because of the hand-stitching and the sort-of vertical slash on each block.  Half of the blocks have a bit of red.  Although hard to see, both the side and bottom panes have some hand-stitching.  And that brings me to the key reason I love this quilt:  its construction.
I was able to work on each block individually and then join them together using a "quilt-as-you-go" technique that I learned from Sharon Pederson's Reversible Quilting. 
Here's the back of this quilt.  This is an Art Gallery fabric from April Rhodes's Bound collection.  It's not black and white - it's actually a dark dark blue.  Some of the fabrics on the front are that dark grey with blue undertones.  The backing fabric became my sashing for the front of the quilt.  For the back and binding I used Kona  snow. See below for a close-up of the back.  For quilters interested on this reversible technique, tomorrow I will do a process post and explain this technique, one that I have taught and used many times.  It's not easier or harder - it's just another way of approaching quilting.