Bloggers' Quilt Festival 2011: The Mod Rail Fence

Hi there to the people dropping by from the Quilt Festival!

I've never done this before, so bear with me if it's not in the 'proper' style for this kind of post.

The Modern Rail Fence
(Yes, I'm terrible at names.)

I bought the fabric for the Modern Rail Fence quilt back in 2000 when I was just getting into quilting. They were bolt ends and dead cheap. At the time, I imagined making a double irish chain with it, only to later discover that there wasn't enough fabric for the queen-sized quilt I wanted.

So it went into the stash.



It went into the stash for ten years.

I pulled it out on occasion, admired it, contemplated it, but never knew what to do with it, until the day I realised that a traditional block, such as the simple Rail Fence could be put together with a modern twist.

Three fabrics, a lot of strip-cutting and piecing, and several layouts later, one finished quilt top!


Six months later and it's back from the quilters!


I really like this design, even though I wasn't convinced the effect was what I wanted to achieve at first. But I think it worked pretty well, and would be a great quilt to do again - either with three solids, or possibly with rainbow-coloured strips.

It was a great learning experience for me in terms of flexibility with design. Before this quilt, I'd been fairly rigid in my choices of colours and patterns for quilts. When I made the Mod Rail Fence, it encouraged me to step outside the box a little: use the same design, but switch up the colours and pattern. Rather than doing the 'triple rails' of the traditional rail fence, why not attempt something a little beyond my comfort zone?



Anyway, thank you to Amy for hosting the Bloggers' Quilt Festival (that apostrophe means it belongs to all of us, right? "The quilt festival of all bloggers" not "the quilt festival of the blogger.") and thanks for dropping by! Go look at some of the other quilters' works!