Welcome to the Sea Breeze MQAL!

Welcome to my day on the Sea Breeze MQAL bloghop!

I watched Canoe Ridge Creations run the MQAL the first time with some interest and delight in the design. However, my primary thought on seeing the size of the quilts was "oh, way too small for me to bother".

I'm generally a big quilts person. In fact, when I was basting a picnic quilt at the Sydney Modern Quilt Group sew-in a couple of months back, one of the women who knows me well studied my work, looked at me and asked, "Isn't it a bit small, Sel?" (And it was small compared to the size my quilts usually end up!)


So, mini-quilts? Not my thing. And then Angie at GnomeAngel decides to run the Sea Breeze MQAL on instagram and intarwebs and puts out a call. And I, like the overenthusiastic, DO ALL THE PROJECTS, A-personality type that is me, sign up to be even busier than I already am!

Plus, HSTs! HSTs are my nemesis. Or possibly my Jekyll-and-Hyde. On one hand, they're so cute and versatile, capable of making so many patterns and sub-patterns, on the other, they require cutting into squares, drawing lines down the middle, sewing on each side of the line, cutting along the line, pressing the seams open, and trimming! That's five extra steps in block development! Who has time for that, I ask you?


Okay, so clearly I have time for that. Or I like the result. One or the other. Possibly both.

With a name like "Sea Breeze" and given the stash of Kona solids occupying my shelf-space, I kind of felt like I really should go the blue fabric route. Lots of blue, and a nice, stormy grey in Kona Slate. (I don't know the specific Konas I used, I'm afraid, I didn't check.)


Then there was the question of design. I wasn't as daring as some of the other bloggers in the MQAL (deviate from the pattern? *clutches pearls* Oh, how could you?) but I did want to do something a little different from the norm. The standard layout looks lovely - like a still, deep pool. But this is the SeaBreeze MQAL, after all. So I figured I'd mix it up.


('scuse the toes!)

Now it's more 'choppy seas' than 'rainforest jumping pool'. And adds a bit of intrigue to the design: the eye focuses on the dark grey rather than the blues.


I backed it in the remaining scraps, and quilted it on my domestic machine which doesn't have a BSR.


The quilting is pretty bad up close, so I'm limiting pics of the actual quilting. Amy Butler's Lark turned out to be the perfect colour for the binding and adds a touch of forest to the overall effect. And I machine-bound it rather than hand-bound it because I was in a hurry to get it done and didn't feel like sewing the binding neatly on.


And here it is with my other weekend finishes - two snowflake cushions and two batik cushions.


I'm still looking at the result wondering what on earth I'll do with it. Right now, I'm tending towards gifting it to the infant son of a couple in my bible study group.

Have you gone around and looked at the various SeaBreeze MQAL quilts yet? There's a Facebook page, an Instagram tag (#seabreezemqal), and GnomeAngel's blog to check out!