Giving Cozy

I'm finally getting around to posting photos of one of the quilts I made for Christmas this year. You know the one I talked about here? Here it is...

You tell me - does it looked like stacked books? It screams it at me, but that may because of me being a bibliophile. Jon said it's a little abstract.

I gave my stepdad this quilt because I have been known to give him books for Christmas. I give him books because I enjoy the conversations where he calls me out of the blue and we talk about the book I've given. I'm hoping that he pulls this one over him while he's reading and still calls me.

The background fabric is Kona Mustard. I wasn't sold on it when it was one solid piece of baby poop, but it's become a favorite color after seeing it with these other fabrics - which I pulled out of the remnant bin by choosing the ones that seemed masculine.

The top is pieced with strips created by cutting my remnant to the desired thickness (I used some 1 1/2" strips and went up to 4") and then cut them in half (resulting in two 22"ish pieces). Then I cut a 22" piece of the background fabric into whatever thickness I needed and sewed each side of the background strip to each side of the book. This created a loop. Then I randomly cut the background fabric, which varies the amount of background on each side of each book. The trick was getting them arranged so that they didn't look like they'd fall over - see that one 7 up from the bottom? I think it needed to be pushed over more to support the books on top of it. Something about this just tells me they're going to topple...

I pieced the back with a luscious gray flannel (which again screamed to me) and a column of squares from each of the book bindings. I quilted in the ditch around each book. I don't remember what I bound it with. 

I'm in serious love with this one - enough that I think I need to make me one. Silly that I didn't remember to take photos of the finished quilt, but I got so excited about giving it that I just rushed right through to wrapping. It makes me want to curl up with a book or one of my guys and spend an afternoon inside.