Tango Foxtrot

After a month of near-constant illness of one kind or another, I finally found my way back to my sewing machine this week. So much for consistency over fits and starts.

At any rate, I am actually quite excited about this new quilt. As I mentioned a month ago, it was a great intersection of inspirations, from Jeni’s Plus Quilt tutorial, to adorable fabric, to the excellent Tangerine Tango challenge.  Does this quilt exactly meet the judging criteria of the challenge? Probably not. But it was still a fun excuse to sew it up.

It’s not as though orange and purple is my go-to favorite color combination, but I love that it’s bold and saturated and a little unusual. My husband remarked that it seemed very Fall-like to him, which I can totally see.

The back is a great dark purple (Kona Berry), with one giant orange plus made from some leftover prints. Each square of the plus is 18″, so pretty darn large. As my husband said when I showed it to him, “subtle, honey. Very subtle.” Whatever, I’m not sure anything about this quilt is “subtle.”

I quilted in straight lines on either side of the seams in a bright orange (very Tangerine Tango) thread, and I love the way it shows up against the dark purple on the back.

The binding is scrappy, mostly using some leftover orange solids from the front (Kona Tangerine and Mango), with a couple pieces of orange prints. I machine-bound this one, and it turned out a bit neater than my first attempt on Triangle Madness. I think I may be a machine-binding convert. I have always loved sewing binding by hand, loved the finality and clean finish of the whole thing. But man, the speed and strength of machine binding is proving a huge draw.

The one bummer is that something appears to have bled in the wash, with this one nasty little mark on one of the lighter-orange pluses. This even with a color catcher! So frustrating.

Still, I’m really happy with this quilt. I highly recommend Jeni’s tutorial if you want a great-looking quilt, and a pretty generous one at that (~65×76), that works up nice and fast. I may very well do this one again.