Tubix Quilt

A little while ago, a blogging friend, Sue from Quilt Times, posted about a quilt that she had made and wanted to publish a pattern (the post is here).  She asked for volunteers to test the instructions for the pattern and I decided to have a go, along with a few others.  I've now finished the quilt top so will share with you what I've made.

This has taken me about 3 weeks, from choosing the fabrics to making the quilt top.  I've used Moda Bella Solids and it took quite a while to choose the right light/dark shades.  Sue's original quilt has orange and light pink blocks for which I substituted green and blue. Although the instructions are in yards and the smaller amounts are eighth yard (4.5") (ie the pink and purple blocks) the minimum cut of fabrics one can get here is quarter metre (9.75") which means more fabric so by swapping the colours around with another background fabric I'd have enough to make another quilt!

Cutting out the white fabric was done in one afternoon, but the other colour blocks were cut as I went along and sewed working two colours at a time.  I tried out one block to see how it went together, but once I'd done the construction, I then worked my usual production line way laying out the pieces ready to join together.

I made all the colour blocks pressing away from the white fabric square in the middle, but that didn't work out when joining with the white squares so asking Sue about pressing it was soon sorted and I joined the rows.

The photo above shows the rows sewn but not joined to each other.  I didn't take another photo before the borders were added on.  That took another couple of afternoons and the photo below shows the quilt now hung in front of the wardrobe doors with the binding (in red) pinned around to check the length of the binding. 

Now the difficult decision of what fabric to buy for the backing, after that it'll be quilting.  I've quite enjoyed how this has gone together, the block construction is easy.   The tricky bit was getting the contrasting shades of the fabric right, but then she did say the longest part of making the quilt was choosing the fabrics. Looking at the photos it doesn't look too bad.  The size of 58" x 70" works out too.

Another lady has made a smaller version in Sue's post here, which is brilliant, but it'll be interesting to see what the other testers made.