Salt Air Lattice Quilt

For Mother's Day this year, I decided to make a quilt for my each of my moms... This is the quilt that I gave my darling mother in law. I used the Moda Salt Air fabric. I love how happy these colors are! Can't go wrong with the primary colors! (that's what I always say at least;)

I used one Moda Layer Cake (which is 42- 10 inch squares that come pre-cut.) I love using layer cakes because it cuts down on all of the cutting you have to do! And then I used half of a Moda White jelly roll (which is 42 pre-cut strips that are 2 1/2 by 44 inches long) for the lattice criss-crosses. 

For the quilting, I used 3 different sizes of measuring bowls from my kitchen and traced a bulls eye in each of the diamonds (I am pretty advanced in my techniques I know! ha ha Just gotta use what you have sometimes;) and then I quilted straight lines on the white lattice pieces. Now for the kicker..... I just used my normal presser foot for the circled bulls eyes. Oh. My. Heck. It was so tricky! I had a heck of a time getting the bulk of my quilt around and around through the neck of my machine as I sewed over the traced circles. Now I am sure some of you are wondering why I did it that way... Well your guess is as good as mine! ha ha I tried out my free motion quilting foot for approximately 3 minutes and the stitches were so uneven due to my lack of experience with it that I put my normal presser foot back in and just went for it. As you can see, my circles aren't perfect, but I just told my Mother-In-Law not to look too close! ha ha (She is super talented at sewing so I was a little embarrassed to give it to her- but I figured it was made with love and that is what counts, right??) :)

If you look at it from far away it looked super cool;)

I had my studly brother Logan help me hold this quilt up again so I could take pictures! Love having a tall  brother to help me with that. (love ya Log)

My favorite way to give quilts as a gift, is to fold it in half and half again (so it is 1/4 the width) and then roll it up into a neat little roll and tie it with cute ribbon.

She loved it! Definitely worth all of the work! :)

So I am not going to go into detail on how I made the entire quilt since we have the Quilt Along coming up soon (I will be announcing the supply list on May 25th- stay tuned)... But I thought I would share how I pieced the top of the quilt in case anyone wanted to recreate it themselves.

I mentioned that I used one Moda layer cake and then half of a Moda jelly roll for the quilt top...

Each of the 42 squares in the layer cake are 10x10 inches. I cut each on the diagonal so there were 84 triangles once I was done cutting the entire layer cake. Then I cut 42 strips of fabric that were 2 1/2 x 15 inches long

Now at this point, you can lay out your triangles and strips to make up your pattern to visualize where you want each fabric piece in relation to all of the others... for mine, I put the yellow fabrics together in a diamond, red in a diamond, blue in a diamond, etc. If you don't care about the fabric being in a specific order or layout and just want it to be random then you don't need to do this step.

To piece each square, I took one of the triangles and pinned it in the middle of one 15 inch strip (there should be a little overhang on each side of the triangle) and stitched it, and then added another triangle to the other side of the strip and stitched it.

Once the two triangles are sewed to the white strip of fabric, iron and press the seams flat. (don't press the seams open, press them away from the white and towards the patterned fabric.)

Next use a straight edge and rotary cutter and square off the excess of the white strip so that the square is "square".

Repeat with each of the triangles and strips until you have 42 squares total. 

When it is all laid out, it should look like this. 

Now you just sew each of your squares together row by row until it is all pieced together. Then to set off the diamond/lattice pattern I added some small borders to finish it off. Pretty simple quilt to put together!!

P.S.... I made a dumb bloggers mistake and forgot to measure this quilt before I gave it away to my mom in law... but it is just a lap sized quilt- nothing too huge!

Stay tuned for the quilt I made for my mom for Mother's day!!