Irish Chainish Quilt

Everybody loves a good scrappy quilt, and I seem to be no exception. The colors, the wildness, the surprising coherence! I'm pretty amazed at the way that all these different colors and prints, which were seemingly picked at random, all come together to make something beautiful. There's something quite magical about that. I call this the Irish Chainish Quilt because while it bears some resemblance to an Irish Chain, and indeed that is the original inspiration, it's also somewhat of a variation. The chains are a bit of an optic illusion. I got the idea from Kelly's Kwilts.

I did custom quilting for this, and used a combination of swirls, pebbles, feathers, and flowers. Pebbles are still my favorite and I'm the most proficient at them, but I'm really happy with the flowers too. I'm not as satisfied with my swirls and feathers, so more practice is needed on those. The different designs mean it's always interesting to quilt. For the binding, I used precut jelly roll strips again.

This is the biggest quilt I've done so far free-motion wise, and the main challenge was the amount of drag I had to deal with. Up close, I can see a lot of issues, though when I step back, it all turns really beautiful. This is officially my favorite quilt (for now), but I'll probably say that about every quilt I finish.