Blogger's Quilt Festival: Juicy Fruit

For Blogger's Quilt Festival this year, I thought I'd link up my Juicy Fruit quilt and my Something New Sampler Quilt (post found here).

My Juicy Fruit quilt is a pattern I wrote for the summer issue of Fat Quarterly and it just screams summertime to me!

I used just over 6 yards of orange fabric to make this bad boy (crazy!). I cut them all up into piles of strings and away I went:

My friend had mentioned to me how he loves the feel of an old quilt - soft and heavy. He really emphasized the weight of a quilt...but I realized that none of my quilts felt like that! I knew what he was talking about, too; my mom's old quilt is really heavy and it feels so comfortable to snuggle under. So I used two layers of a nice thick 80/20 Hobbs batting. Holy cow, that was hard to push around in my 8.5" throat space!!

It wasn't just difficult because it was thick - but also because this is a large quilt to begin with: 80" x 80". It fits on a full size bed. But now it's the nice heavy weight I was looking for.

The two layers of quilt really gives some great definition to the quilting. I used a whole pile of orange and yellow threads and quilted intersecting lines.

To make the quilting look even chunkier, I used some pearl cotton 8 (tutorial on how to quilt with this thick thread here).

I'm not usually much of an orange person, but this quilt has been awesome to have at the house - it really warms up the colder days!

Linking up to Blogger's Quilt Festival by Amy:

Quick stats: Juicy Fruit Quilt 80" x 80" Full-sized bed quilt Made with Kona snow and a pile of oranges Two layers of Hobbs 80/20 batting