Texas Forever quilt: A finish!

I'm so excited to finally reveal the mystery quilt I've been working on for the past few months. I passed it on to my mom on Christmas as a late birthday present, so I can now introduce the Texas Forever quilt! (I hope you know the reference. If not, I highly suggest you find out what it is and spend the rest of your holiday break binge watching it.)

This quilt grew out of the idea for my I ♥ Texas pillow. Originally, I dreamed of doing some sort of massive Texas applique quilt, like I used in the pillow, but I quickly realized that was never going to work. Around the same time, I got into a conversation with Corinne of Must Love Quilts, and she showed me her own Texas Forever quilt, which she'd just begun to work on at the time. I also discovered this awesome Texas quilt by Dana Michaelson, which was featured at QuiltCon 2013, and decided to take some inspiration from both.

After much internal debate, I decided to do the quilt in all solids. The top is a combination of several Moda Bella solids in Night Sky, Chartreuse, Pesto, Marine, Turquoise, Prussian Blue, and Blue Raspberry, along with Silver for the gray surrounding the state. I basically just started out cutting a ton of squares and rectangles in the various colors and then began arranging them on my design wall (ahem, basement floor) until I got an arrangement that worked.

For the quilting, I used a light teal in a square spiral shape that's centered over Dallas, my hometown. The spirals are spaced about 3" apart, which makes for a sturdy but really soft quilt. This turned out to be the biggest quilt I've ever made (it finished at about 80"square), but the quilting turned out to be pretty easy on my home machine.

I did a scrappy binding using one of the Moda Bella solids (maybe Prussian Blue?) and a bit of one of the Alison Glass fabrics that I used on the back (Grate in Night from the Lucky Penny collection). As usual, I attached it all by machine. For the back, I used up the rest of the solids, plus the Alison Glass and a big piece of Modern Meadow herringbone.

 

I'm so happy with how this quilt turned out, especially the colors. If I had it to do again, I probably would have chosen a different gray for the neutral on the front (either darker or lighter, so some of the colored solids would have popped a bit more), but other than that, it turned out pretty much how I envisioned it. And most importantly, my mom loves it, so my job is done. Texas Forever, y'all.

UPDATE:  I wrote a follow-up post about the Texas Forever quilt, which includes a "roundup" of similar state quilts, patterns, and designs that I discovered in blog land after finishing my quilt. You can check out the post right here.