Quilt for a Cause

Washed Wood Rainbow Quilt

This is my first Ambassador project for Benartex fabrics, and I am excited that it is going to help support an important local organization, ADOPT (Animal Dignity Organization of Pequannock Township). If you have been following me for a while you know that I have two cats, both rescues, who love fabric and all things quilty. Well, they were adopted from the Pequannock Animal Shelter, which ADOPT helps to fund and maintain volunteers. This quilt will help with their fundraising, which helps with everything from food to veterinarian bills. 

So why this quilt? Well, I really love working with the Washed Wood Collection because each color has a delightful range of hues, and really does look like wood. I went through a lot of different ideas for the quilt design (hopefully more of them will be seen soon), but in the end I decided on a remix of the Rainbow Quilts pattern that combines both the Tiles and the Mosaic layout. Since I was working with two sets of natural colors (browns and greens) I wanted the colors to blend into each other the same way that you might see in nature. How exactly did I do that? I took all of my fabrics and divided them into my colors 1-10, which become the main colors for each corresponding row. Then rather than use a single color for the background (like I normally would in the Tile layout) I took the colors 10-1 and used those as the background colors. Using the fabric swatch chart made all of this a lot easier to keep track of as I was working! 

Completed Color Chart for the Washed Wood Rainbow Quilt.

The washed wood fabric also presents another interesting question - when you are working with it, do you keep the grain of the “wood” going in the same direction at all times, or do you rotate some of your “wood” squares? In this case I opted to keep the grain all going in the same direction, but I think it would also be really interesting to make this quilt again and rotate the background squares 90 degrees, so the grain is going in the opposite direction and the squares look more intentionally inset. 

Rows from the Washed Wood Rainbow Quilt.

The other big change that I made was using a scrappy binding. I went back and forth on this for a while, and still don’t know if I would have done it if I had used other colors, but I really love how the binding turned out in this case. To make a scrappy binding like this one you want to cut 10” by 2 ½” (or whatever width binding you are using) pieces. You will need 4 times the number of  WOF strips that the pattern calls for (ex. If the pattern says to cut (5) 2 ½” by WOF strips you will want to cut 20 of the 10” pieces). And then sew the pieces together, making sure that the joins are all at the same angle. In this case I wanted the pieces to alternate green and brown but didn’t have any pattern in mind beyond that so I divided my pieces up into two piles and randomly choose one from each to make the initial sets, then I just kept combining sets until I was left with one long piece of binding. You can see how it turned out. 

Section of scrappy binding from the Washed Wood Rainbow Quilt.

For the month of March $2 dollars from the sale of every Rainbow Quilt pattern on my website will be donated to ADOPT.   And I would encourage you, if you have done the research and are seriously looking at getting a pet, check out your local rescues and shelters. There are a lot of wonderful animals out there looking for loving homes!