The “Inspired” block is a free-to-download pattern that you can access here. For the background story behind this block, you can check out this earlier post.

It’s been a while since I’ve finished the “Inspired” quilt top. I really like how it turned out:

When the fabrics are this colorful and busy but there is a very stark design element that needs to be accentuated, I find it challenging to find a good quilting pattern. In this case, the solid strips are what makes this design interesting, and I thought an overall quilting pattern would not do them justice. So, I took my time to think about how to quilt this piece.

The first question was the choice of thread color. I didn’t want the quilting to dominate the patchwork design. Given the white prints on all the fabrics and the light-colored solid, I gravitated toward light colors ranging from white to light greys and light blues. In the end, I decided to go with two colors: light grey for the solid light blue fabric and white for the rest.

The next question is, of course, the quilting pattern. I wanted to preserve the angular design of the quilt, so I decided to stick with straight-line quilting. Generally, I am not fond of very dense quilting, mainly because I get bored of quilting if I need it to do it for long periods of time. But also, my patchwork designs usually feature specific shapes or geometric patterns that I want to keep in the spotlight and not behind heavy quilting. In this case, I knew that I wanted the colorful squares to pop and the solid strips to be more subdued, so I started with quilting those strips. I’m still working on the quilting, so I can’t tell you how it ends up just yet, but I can say that I’m quite excited about this quilt!