I decided to enter my Strimla Quilt in the Blogger’s Quilt Festival this year! I have followed the Festival for a few years but have never thought I would enter one of my quilts. But as I promised myself to show my work more, I am entering, two, yes two! of my quilts I finished recently.

I entered this one in the Original Design category. Hopefully that’s a good fit. I was inspired by a painting I saw somewhere online, but did not pin it before my browser crashed so I will never be able to properly credit my muse… it was done in several shades of red, with the darkest being in the middle. I forgot about the painting for a while until one day I found myself not quite inspired to work on a wip hanging on my design wall, so I started sewing together some 1 in strips of fabric. The dark blue square was born.

After a few weeks spent on finally finishing other projects, I got back to this square, chose some lighter blue fabric and made two more. 4 more squares in yellow and orange, and the center design was finished.

As I pondered about the background, I realized that the color squares make up a part of a 9 patch block. Can you see it? With the two white squares between orange and yellow – a huge 9 patch square. So I decided to mirror that in the background. So I made 9 patch squares that were 1/3 the size of the middle design in neutral, low volume, black and white or gray fabrics.

When the background was all done, I was still not very satisfied, so I added a border with even smaller squares. Finally I was happy with the design. And that’s what I am showing you today.

I have had many issues with this quilt and I wrote all about it in the original post.  There are more photos there as well. And here you can see some work-in-progress photos.