The previous time I was at the longarm quilter, I had a whole day because of a long weekend. So I brought about a yard of wide back fabric. You may remember this gray fabric from the backing for my Bright Squares Quilt. I marked out borders and 7 sections — one for each color of the rainbow — although I only ended up doing 6 colors because I ran out of time.
For each color, I did a different style, hence the name: Rainbow Sampler Quilt. It was great for practice and it ended up looking awesome.
For red, I worked on my paisley. You can see how I fell into a rhythm after getting into a bit (I started on the right hand side which was actually upper left when I was quilting it).
For orange I did stair steps or I think sometimes it’s called tranquil waters.
Yellow was spirals. I’ve done spirals before, but they can always use practice to work on the evenness and roundness.
Green was leaves. This was kinda obvious. Green. Leaves. But it was a new pattern so I enjoyed it. I’d use it again on the right quilt.
Blue started out as pebbles (or bubbles as I was thinking of them) but about 1/2 hour in, I got annoyed by how long the bubbles were taking (I had been quilting for some 6 hours at this point) so I switched to waves. I think the bubbles looked okay (though they could definitely use more practice and I think they wouldn’t look quite so bad if the thread color matched the fabric — that would hide some of the error), but wow they take a lot of time.
For purple, I did flowers. I switched up the sizes for interest.
Finally, all along the borders, I worked on my feathers. For those I did do gray thread to match the gray background.
Overall, I was very happy with how the patterns turned out and I plan on using most of them in quilts at some point or another. Even the feathers weren’t too bad! But definitely good to get a feel for them before putting them into a quilt I care a lot about.
I used a gray bobbin thread (same as the feathers) so that it wouldn’t show amongst the colors and I liked the contrast with the turquoise background fabric I picked. You can’t really tell here, but it does look nice. Both the front and back fabrics were wide back cottons I got from JoAnn’s with a sweet 50% off coupon.
For the binding I used some dark gray Hawthorne Threads hues. For this one I machine sewed it. First to the front, then topstitched on the front to catch it on the back. Since it was just a sampler quilt I wasn’t going to hand bind it and I think it turned out well enough.
Overall, quite happy with the results of this quilt!
