This quilt is made of random blocks in 5 colors: brown, cream, dark blue, hunter green and burgundy. Nandoc wanted it to have an earth-tone feel with mostly shades of brown and cream. This quilt was also intended for a man, so she wanted it to be mostly tone on tone patterns without any flowers. I ended up picking 4 fabrics each of brown and cream and 2 each of the blue, green and burgundy. The border adds a bit of a punch by using a cream and brown speckled very dark blackish-brown fabric to separate the blocks from the strips.
I was originally going to tie this quilt because I wasn't sure my regular-sized sewing machine could handle quilting such a large quilt. After a disappointing trip to the store where nothing seemed right to tie it, I finally decided to take a leap of faith and quilt it on my small machine. I found a very nice variegated dark brown to cream thread which I used for the top stitching and then a matching cream color for the backing. The quilting is a diamond pattern with the border stitched in the ditch. You can see that in this first picture I haven't quite finished the quilting and it doesn't have on the brown binding. I laughed so hard when I first noticed my puppy, Arya (pronounced ARE-ee-uh, like the Italian Aria but from the book, Eragon) looking really sad in at me because I wouldn't let her run all over the quilt.
This second picture is the finished quilt on my dad's king sized bed.
(Random 3" blocks, strip border approximately 114" x114" 2009)
