Little Stitches Calico Quilt

The idea for this quilt came from Alicia Paulson's Embroidery Companion. She had a lovely quilt made from big squares of sweet and old-fashioned prints, interspersed with embroidered squares.  I made a few changes -- four-inch squares rather than seven-, and instead of the farm animals I picked embroidery patterns from Aneela Hoey's Little Stitches. I also used only calicoes in yellows, greens, and purples, because I have a weakness for them.

I thought I'd found the perfect fabric for the backing -- a vintage yellow linen, just wide enough for the top, but I didn't notice until too late that there was a small section that was not wide enough.  I had to patch it with a skinny strip:

 

That was fun to quilt through.

The finishing technique Paulson used is now a new favorite of mine.  Instead of sewing on my mortal enemy binding, or even folding the back over for a false binding, I layered the back, front, and batting right sides together, sewed all the way around (except for a gap at the bottom), turned the quilt right side out, and slip-stitched the opening closed.  Quilting each non-embroidered square was the very last step.

I've written about the embroidered squares before, but I like them so much I want to show them off again: