City Park Ready for Quilting
Feb 8th, 2010
Greg’s Christmas gift finally has a back!
He picked out Squares Black from the Mingle collection by Monaluna, gorgeous choice and very manly.
The design is City Park by Cherry House Quilts. I absolutely LOVE this pattern. The layout is very clever. There are 6 unique blocks that keep the piecing fun. They go together like a puzzle resulting in a final design that creates visual interest while being mathematically balanced in scale. The blocks create a secondary design of the black squares in multiple sizes. The finished quilt size is 63″ x 72″.
The pattern uses 19 different Kona cotton solids. I attempted to make it exactly like the cover quilt. Several colors are now discontinued and substitutes were used. The final block layout diagram is in color but it does not contain a key identifying which colors are which. This confused me a bit, ultimately I put the main blocks in place that were obvious and winged it on how the remaining colors were distributed. Because so many similar colors are used it would have looked great no matter how they were placed.
In terms of difficulty, I would say it is easy to intermediate. I’m a bit OCD about the accuracy of intersecting seams (there are quite a few where the secondary black squares are getting formed at the intersection of multiple blocks). I used my seam ripper whenever things didn’t line up. I pressed all my seams open when piecing the blocks. I was thankful I’d done this once I got to the point of joining the final blocks. There is no way to know in advance how each block is going to get oriented so pressing the seams to one side might leave you trying to line up blocks where both seams were pressed in the same direction creating a lot of bulk.
I did press my seams to one side when joining the finished blocks into rows: even rows to one side, odd rows in the opposite direction. The interlocking seams made joining the rows much easier.
The top and backing are headed off to visit my long arm guru Marybeth O’Halloran at White Lotus Quilting. That way Greg can be napping under it before next Christmas.
