I have this color combo love right now that involves greys and mustards and I just had to make a quilt with these colors.  I’m picturing lots of variations on this theme in the future!  Combine that with my love of Half Square Triangles and you have this quilt.  I’ve been staying up way too late at night working on this.  We’ve also had some windy and rainy weather lately – courtesy of Hurricane Patricia – so it’s allowed me to ditch some of my Fall yard work in favor of sewing and finishing this quilt!

I used a variety of favorite quilting fabrics for this, including the ever awesome Rainwalk Ripple by Anna Graham. I can’t get enough of that fabric.  It’s a canvas fabric, but sewed up nicely right alongside the quilting cottons.  I also used a couple I pulled from the beautiful Magnolia line by Alisse Courter.  And, since I always love a little text fabric sneaked in, I used a little bit of Robert Kaufman Scribble Notes in White. This makes me very happy.

The solid color is Robert Kaufman Kona Cotton Ash – such a great neutral and my favorite solid. And the binding is Squared Elements in Shadow.

I did simple straight quilting, at 3.5 stitches/inch, which I really like and went well with the lines of the blocks.  Each block was trimmed to 5 inches square.

I used Warm & Plush cotton batting, which I washed and dried before using, even though it has no scrim.  I live dangerously.   It worked out.

My favorite part of the quilt is doing the mitered binding at the end.

The finished size of this quilt is 44″ x 54″, a very nice lap size quilt to snuggle with, just big enough for two.

I had a vision for this quilt that I wanted something light and airy that reminded me of fresh white laundry hanging on a clothesline – lots of whites and light greys and nothing else.
There were so many fun fabrics to chose from. I scoured online fabric stores for grey and white designs that caught my eye.  A couple of these in the stack below did not make the final cut, but it was a hard decision because I liked them all so much. Sometimes a fabric just doesn’t go with what you had in mind.

I think my favorite fabric of all time is this Cloud 9 fabric called Petal Print Twig.  It reminds me of a pencil drawing and is so delicate.  I wanted to sort of build the quilt around that. Isn’t it pretty?  I ended up using 12 different fabrics plus Robert Kaufman Kona White, which is such a great pure white.

For the quilt design, I did not want to chop up some of the fabric into small squares because I wanted to keep more of the pattern repeats, so I settled on finished strips of 2″ x 6″ with a smaller strip of squares alongside.

The finished size of the quilt is 42″ x 57″.

For the backing, I used Get Back! 108″ wide backing fabric in white and gray.  Although this is a convenient fabric to use for backing because of it’s width, I probably won’t use it again because it’s too thin for my taste.

These are a couple of panels as I was working on them.

I love the binding fabric so much  – it’s Dress Stripes in Charcoal by Hawthorne Threads.  They have started manufacturing their own fabrics using a digital printing method.  The fabric was crisp and really nice to work with.

As for the name of the quilt – Grey Havens?  I’m a big LOTR fan!

I love the look of a quilt used as a tablecloth.  So I thought I would make one for our kitchen table.  We’re empty nesters now, the kitchen table doesn’t get used for meals nearly as much as when my kids were at home and so I made one.  I don’t care if gets some crumbs or spills on it – it’s meant to be used and thrown in the washer.

I love postage stamp quilts but I wanted to use coordinated fabrics that would look right in the kitchen area, which is black and gold.  Then I wanted a touch of green to complement all the greenery outside the window.  I used Hawthorne Thread’s color grid tool to select fabrics and found so many that I liked.  I decided on about twelve fabrics I really liked and did 16-patch blocks.  The background fabric is Laura Gunn’s Painter’s Canvas in Cream.

There are 2,304 squares in this quilt!  The top took close to 30 hours to make – there was a lot of rotary cutting, piecing and matching seams. The finished quilt is about 60″ x 60″.

For the backing, I chose a fabric from the Maker line called Make and Pin.  I really love this fabric.  For the binding, I chose Robert Kaufman Ring Spots in Pepper.  And the batting is Warm and Natural Cotton.   It drapes very nicely but has a lot of structure because of all those seams!  Lots of seams.

It’s nice to have a quilt you enjoyed making so much right out where you can see it all the time.