This post is part of the 2019 Gypsy Wife Quilt-Along! See all posts.

Oh my, look what happened!

I thought I’d take my time assembling my Gyspy Wife quilt top, but I couldn’t resist the fun of puzzling it together. I guess I am a fan of partial seams. They keep things interesting!

Even though the process was fun, it was quite the marathon. I know I put in more than a full day’s work just cutting strips and assembling the background. I didn’t want to stop! I could even feel it in my back when I was done.

Part of the excitement was discovering how my choice of background fabrics would makeover the blocks. The quilt top looks so different assembled with a background vs. floating as blocks on my cream design wall.

Probably my favorite part of quilting is seeing how fabric choices translate into actual patchwork. For my Gypsy Wife background, I selected a rainbow of Freespirit Designer Essential Solids. To keep things interesting, I interspersed those solids with some lowish volume Anna Maria Horner fabrics from her most recent and older collections.

Oooooh, rainbow love! I feel I managed to strike a balance between merging the background strips with the blocks without letting the blocks disappear entirely. After all I was aiming for “medium contrast” between blocks and background, as I shared early on in my Choosing Colors + Fabrics post.

Elora told me that it was pretty, so surely things turned out well! You can’t really go wrong when you’re using 90% Anna Maria Horner fabric.

I’m amazed at all those seams. With 1” and .5” finished background strips, this quilt is piecey indeed! It’s a good idea to reinforce the edges of a quilt like this with a stitch line around the parameter. That protects the seams from popping open at the edges when the quilt top is handled and quilted. I need to do that.

Now to quilt it before we pack up the longarm sewing machine in May. Yay!