Diamonds

One of the really cool things about where we live is we get to see rainbows frequently.  Up on our hill I know when the weather conditions are just right and I have everyone check out the doors and windows for rainbows.  This happens a lot and has become sort of a joke around here with my husband and kids (because I'm usually right :-).  We have seen rainbows in winter before, but not this winter, only inside with fabric. 

My new little quilter, Lydia, chose this diamond pattern for the quilt she is now working on, and she wanted me to make one, too.  I knew I had a nice collection of black and white fabrics in my stash, and so the same day she had her fabric shopping trip at The Little Foot Shoppe, I chose a pretty pink fabric to use for my diamonds.  I had all my fabric together and kept thinking that just the pink and black and white wasn't enough.  The pink is kind of a tone-on-tone print and I thought it would blend well with some other brightly colored batiks that I already had.  This is what I came up with. 

The pattern that is my inspiration here is called Emerald City from the Cut Loose Press.  I didn't actually purchase it, but I am using the picture found here as a reference.  The blocks are made using the Scrap Crazy 6" templates from Creative Grids which are AWESOME for cutting accurate pieces.  There are a lot of possibilities for quilt designs with these templates, and I highly recommend them.

I made my own diagram to help with fabric cutting and placement of the blocks.  I don't own any fancy quilting software (though that would be fun), but I used some scrapbooking software that I'm pretty good with to do this.  I assigned each black and white print a color and glued a little scrap onto my diagram so I could remember what was what. 

Yeah, that's right...  I already had all of this fabric in my house waiting to be used someday except the pink diamond fabric, and I'm pretty sure I could have found a pink fabric here already without trying very hard.  Bummer that this quilt isn't a project from my UFO Challenge list.

I cut the fabrics and separated them into stacks - one stack for each colored diamond row.  You can see above the pinks and purples that still need to be stitched together.  Actually the piecing has been very quick.  Planning and cutting took the most time.  I am just adding rows as I get them done. 

Aunt Brenda thinks this might be a good choice for Quilt Camp 2015.  What do you think?  This can be done easily with a layer cake, and I am planning on making another one that will look very different with some pretty printed fabrics to show another example of this pattern in a completely different, more traditional style. 

I have really been doing a lot of longarm quilting, and I will show you some lovely finishes on Friday.  Please come back and visit! 

I'm linking up at Freshly Pieced for Work In Progress Wednesday.  You can visit there, too, and check out some other WIPs.