Caterpillar Top - From A Month of Sundays

My husband called it Caterpillar so that name will kind of stick. But I also think of it as zippers or confetti strips. The original quilt, published in A Month of Sundays, was called Sherbet. In that case it was for the colours of the quilt.

Originally, I started this quilt simply to be step outs for a class I was teaching. It isn't often that I cut out the whole quilt before sewing a stitch, but with an already published pattern that is certainly the thing to do! So I demoed the piecing and assembly back in June, then it sat.

A few months ago my SIL asked if I would make quilts for her boys, my nephews. Of course the answer was yes. So we let the 5 year old pick out fabric, I grabbed what I had from their baby quilts, and we talked about patterns. When I started this particular quilt I wasn't intending it for any purpose other than a class sample. In the end though - and not just because I'm a multitasker - I thought it was perfect for my nephew.

I made two changes from the original pattern. One small, one significant. The small one was cutting the side borders narrower. In the original pattern they are 12 1/2'' wide. Because this was intended for a single bed I trimmed them down to 6 1/2''. That means the quilt finishes out at 66 1/2'' wide instead of 78 1/2''.

The big change was in the colour scheme for the quilt. Coming from A Month of Sundays the original quilt was full of low volume fabrics on a creamy, solid background. It shows the success of using scale of print to get value differences even with low volume fabrics. In this version I chose a coloured background. It's a Kona, but I'm not sure which colour (my colour card has gone missing). When I bought it I thought I would use some creamy prints, perhaps like these ones. In the end, the whole thing begged to be nice and bright. Now that's a way to turn up the volume!