New Picnic Quilt

I've had a stack of fat quarters picked out to become this picnic quilt for at least a year and half.  It's evolved a little since then, but with half of this summer left for picnicking, the stack finally became a useful quilt! In fact, we've been taking it out regularly for over a month, and even in these pictures it's fairly covered with dirt, smashed bugs, and PB&J stains. It's so nice to have a quilt just for taking out to get dirty. 

Hendrix was a great guardian as I took these pictures at the park the other day. (Two birds, one photo shoot.) The kids really love this quilt. It totally makes a picnic somehow feel more picnic-y. We didn't join a pool this summer, so the season has been marked with making constant rounds around the city's parks, accompanied by the new blanket. Really, Cincinnati has such great parks! We are lucky.

I think it's about 60" by 72". Can't be positive, because I'm too lazy to get up and measure. The fabric selections started with 6 of my very favorite prints from Amy Butler's Lark line. Love how saturated the colors are in that one. Then I added some B&W, the ever-present Lizzy House Pearl Bracelets, some Cloud 9 Cut Out & Keep, and a little Lu Summers Summersville. Plus solid white and other coordinating scraps. The squares were cut to 5" unfinished. I put it together fairly randomly, not really planning what would go where. I just paired light with dark together initially and tried to keep the black spread out. Chain piecing made this quilt top come together super fast, even at this large size. 

The quilting is just a quarter inch on either side of every seem, both vertical and horizontal. It's not my most perfect quilting job, but definitely good enough for an outside quilt. 

The binding is a light sketchy plaid from Angela Walter's first line for Art Gallery, which I picked up at Sewn while having a fun girl's sewing night there with my awesome boss and her daughters. It's so fun to finish a quilt while your actually with someone who knows how exciting that feeling is! I should arrange dates with encouraging sewing friends for every time I finish the binding on a quilt. Binding party anyone?