City Stripes – A King Sized Quilt

My sister in law recently acquired a piece by YURI MASNYJ and decided she wants to hang it in her bedroom – where she will be sure to see it everyday.

This lead to her desire to have a new quilt for her king-sized bed that would coordinate with the print and the variety of other beautiful artworks she has in her room. (She runs an art gallery and her whole house features AMAZING art.)

I was super honored that she commissioned me to come up with a quilt!  We worked together on the design, and after seeing THIS quilt and THIS quilt I came up with this sketch:

And then it was off to the races!  I drew a grid over my sketch to help me keep track of the proportions:

Each row was developed and built out, then framed with grey.  The rows were then joined and the final border was fleshed out until I had my desired width.

My Bernina people said that they would never try to quilt a King on their machine.  I have a 550 QE and I just didn’t want to give up and send it to a quilter without giving it a try – especially since I knew I really wanted a version of straight line quilting! I used a thin cotton batting and am happy to report that with my walking foot and ziggy zaggy stitch 16, as well as a large table with chairs around helping support the blanket, AND some clean gardening gloves to aid in my guiding of the fabric, I really had ZERO problems quilting this blanket.  Zig Zag stitches every 1.5 – 3.5 inches throughout the entire blanket.  I did it in two sittings.

The backing is three panels: stripes, white and grey.  The binding is stripe fabric (an homage to Red Pepper Quilts): some skinny stripes, some wider.

I am looking forward to making this quilt a little sister someday!  I’d love to play with this design again on a smaller scale.