The Mountain Rainbows pattern is available in the Flying Parrot Quilts shop!
I’ve made a couple of versions of my Mountain Rainbows quilt with neutral backgrounds and rainbow Dresden Plates. I wanted to see what other color schemes besides neutral-and-rainbow might work for this quilt.
So, since the quilt has “Mountain” in the title, I decided to make a more explicitly mountain-y version with a purple background and green Dresdens. The purple is inspired by the purple color of mountains far in the distance. The greens are intended to represent trees on the mountains (clearly, I have spent most of my life on the east coast of the US, where mountains don’t get tall enough to rise above the tree line!).
The purples are all solids, and for the greens I chose a variety of prints with lighter greens on top and darker greens on the bottom. The purple is the negative space here, and I like that this is a great illustration of how you can have something interesting going on in your negative space; it doesn’t all have to be a flat expanse of solid fabric!
For the quilting, I quilted leaves in the Dresden Plates. For the background, I got really fancy and drew out some trees on newspaper. Then I traced them and stitched through the paper placed on top of the quilt. This would really only work for a small quilt like this, but it turned out great here. I’m sure there’s an easier way of doing that, but 🤷♀️! I had already sandwiched it by the time I fully decided on the quilting I wanted to use for those sections, and it would have been hard to trace them on the dark fabric anyway.
Binding
One of my favorite features of this particular pattern is the pieced, matched, and angled binding. The pattern includes instructions for this type of binding, which keeps the color flow going while still providing that tiny bit of a border that a binding gives a quilt. You only really notice that border where the Dresden Plates come to the edge of the quilt. You could certainly finish this quilt with a facing as well, but I like that bit of a border there. Besides, it’s always good to have more options in your quilting toolkit! My friend Marybeth very kindly put the binding on in order to help test the instructions for that part of the pattern.
I took this quilt out for a little photoshoot at our local botanical gardens and had fun trying to find some nice locations despite the fact that it is decidedly fall here! I’ll leave you with a few more photos of the Mountain Rainbows quilt in various spots.
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