Trip Around the Rainbow

 Welcome to Treadlestitches!  

After a couple of weeks of attending more to my regular life, I finally have a little finish.  It's a Trip Around the World baby-sized quilt that I'm calling Trip Around the Rainbow.  Like everybody else, I have lots of UFOs I could work on, but there's nothing more fun than a new project.  (I know you know what I mean!)

Over the years I've made lots of these Trip Around the World quilts.  The only difference here is using the rainbow as a color guide, with red in the corners working toward purple in the center.  The squares are cut at 5 in., and the quilt is 40.5 in. square finished.

Here's the back, a "cloudy" purple with white stars.  The binding is a multi-colored print of fireworks.  For quilting, I stitched an X in each square with the serpentine stitch.  The batting is a soft and warm poly, from the roll given to me by my friend Joey.  (Thanks, Joey!)

There are hardly any novelty prints in this quilt, which is unusual for me, but I chose the fabrics mostly for intensity of color.  Two butterfly prints made it in, the orange and the aqua, and there are also light blue bubbles and yellow stars on blue.

This pattern would also look good with the colors reversed and red in the center.  Maybe I'll make one like that sometime.

The binding for the TATW quilt came from this large piece on the left.  I bought this stack at the Historic Bloomington Antique Mall in Bloomington, Indiana, where we spent a long weekend including viewing the eclipse.

It was a fun place to browse.  They have two floors plus a basement.  Of course my eyes went right to the antique quilts.

Hubby and I met at Indiana University and graduated in 1976, so when we found out Bloomington was in the path of totality we decided to go there.  The campus was beautiful as it always is in spring, with lots of flowering trees.  The eclipse itself was amazing and beyond my powers of description.  The university had set up a viewing area in a meadow, with live music and food stands and hundreds of people.  When the sky turned dark the street lights turned on.  The birds disappeared, and bats flew out over our heads.  Then suddenly the light came back, but everything looked strange.  Truly an awe inspiring experience.

Indiana's spring is farther along than Wisconsin's.  Their daffodils were mostly done, but we did see a few in their prime, like this one.  The gorgeous yellow made me think about the Rainbow Scrap Challenge color of the month.

Stretched stars were quick to make from 5 in. cut squares and 2.5 in. white squares for corners.

These are small, so I'm going to need lots of them!

I also made some more hexagons for this project.  I don't have very many yellow 1800s reproduction scraps, so I have to repeat a lot.  It won't matter in the finished quilt.  

Weirdly, I just realized how similar both of these yellow sets are.  Both have light stars that appear when you set them together.  And both only have two seams.  Hmm.  I didn't plan it that way at all.

Who loves legos and the library?  This Little Guy!

I hope you have as much fun as he does this week.  And every week!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap