Fat Man's Squeeze

I managed to do some sewing before my machine dropped into its cabinet and out of sight for the duration of family visits for three weeks.  I'm blaming my occasional grumpiness on a sewing machine no longer in plain sight and available to calm me down.  If I offended you during this busy time, please forgive me.

I made a patriotic quilt in June in honor of the 4th of July.  Last December I came across "Strip-Smart Quilts" by Kathy Brown at JoAnn's.  It caught my eye because of the red, white, and blue which always catches my eye.  Of course, I used my coupon and bought it.  Later this spring Grant's Park by Minick and Simpson hit the shelves at quilt shops.

Do you see the similarity in color way to the quilt on the cover?  I knew this was my fabric so bought a jelly roll of Grant's Park which sat around mocking me for weeks. I knew that June was my time to tackle my very first jelly roll quilt.

The book had great instructions and diagrams.  The only difficulty that I had was that once I had sewn strip sets, cut them on the diagonal, and mixed them up and sewn them into blocks I had blocks with four sides on the bias.  It made it a bit tricky when I was sewing on my borders, but it looked much better after I did the machine quilting.  I loved the look of a binding which matches the outer border.

I created a simple label with my sewing machine for the back.

I put a stripe of small blue print down the middle and used the largest print in the collection for the rest of the backing.

The name "Fat Man's Squeeze" caused confusion at our family reunion during the Quilting Bee.  Kathy Brown said the name came from a favorite hiking trail in the Appalachian Mountains where one had to squeeze between two large rocks.  This quilt looks great draped over a chair in my family room.