irish chain quilt

A few days ago I finished my Irish Chain quilt, and I'm totally over the moon, I so love how it turned out. I started off with a stack of my favorite Denyse Schmidt fabric, added some text prints for fun, and reached for Kona Sky as my solid. I followed  this fantastic tutorial showing an easy way to assemble all the 9 patch blocks needed for the quilt top.

I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to hand quilt it. And that's what I did. I first outlined all the main solid squares but they felt sort of empty, so I decided to do an X inside each square.

I think that gave it just the right amount of quilting without overpowering all the pretty little squares.

I decided to stay with Denyse Schmidt fabric for the backing, too.

I love both of these prints, they are so pretty, and sort of vintage looking, and girly.  I think they play really nicely together as well as compliment the quilt top only the way DS fabrics can.

The whole time I was attaching the binding on I was questioning whether I made the right choice. I usually don't use this color in my sewing a lot, and to choose it for the binding was quite out of my comfort zone. At the end, I'm glad I went with my first instinct  because it frames the whole quilt so very nicely.

Finished size of this quilt is 56" x 68". Perfect lap sized quilt, if you ask me.

Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Svetlana