The Paintbox Quilt is finished!
This quilt is made with 64 - 6.5" blocks in 32 color combinations (8 by 8 blocks with 1.5" sashing). Each combination is a Kona cotton solid and a monochromatic quilting print. One of the blocks in each combination is made with a printed center and outer ring and the other is made with a solid center and outer ring.
I had a hard time deciding how to lay out the blocks for the quilt. In the end, I placed the two black and two chocolate brown squares (the darkest ones) at each of the corners. Then, I placed the other squares so they were, roughly, going from warm in the upper left corner to cool in the lower right.
I alternated the orientation of the squares so the "pulled" corners were going in opposite directions.
On the back, I made a pieced panel with a little rectangle of each of the Kona cottons. I put them in rainbow order and then arranged the pieces in a 4 x 8 formation, zig-zagging the color order back and forth through each row. I'm surprisingly happy with how that color arrangement worked out, actually.
The letters on the back are just simple Kona cotton appliques, made using this technique. I just printed out really big letters from Microsoft Word to make the patterns. (If you do this, I recommend formatting your text for outline, so you don't waste a lot of printer ink.)
The washed and quilted linen is so incredibly soft, which makes this a very comfy quilt too!
I originally had a black and white binding on this quilt, but it was a little "too much" so I ended up going with this gold and white stripe from Kaufman's Pimatex Basics, which I really like.
I've just written up a quick tutorial for the blocks, which is here.
I think this quilt pattern would be interesting in a more limited color palette. You can also see here where Jennifer is making a similar quilt with all patterned fabrics, which looks really cool.
I couldn't resist adding this last photo of Maeby helping me with the binding. You can see from the photos above that George-Michael helped me photograph, but Maeby was an integral part of the construction process.
