Giant Storm at Sea

Last fall, my sister and I decided to make a lap sized quilt for our grandfather.  For some reason, I had been looking at "Storm at Sea" quilts and I convinced my sister that we should make a Storm at Sea but greatly enlarged.

"storm at sea" design from here

First of all, after making my quilt, I can't imagine making more of the intricate Storm at Sea quilts with so many blocks!  We did 4 blocks and that was all I could deal with.  This would have to be a paper pieced quilt to get all the points to line up!

We went to the fabric store with the idea of getting some "manly" fabrics, like greens, browns, etc, but definitively wanted to do prints.  Well, we came home with blue solids hahaha.  We tried so hard to find some prints but in the end decided it was more "us" with the blues and the solids.

We used some quilt calculators online to find the dimensions for the "square in a square" blocks.  The hardest part was the "diamond in a rectangle" block.  We couldn't find dimensions and then we messed up so many times before figuring out how to get the corner pieces on the rectangle to be the correct size.  Never again!  This picture was taken to celebrate the first correct diamond piece!

The completed quilt top:

Before I started the quilting, I googled Storm at Sea quilts just to try and see how they did the quilting because I didn't just want to do a simple stipple or loops on this quilt.  I found one quilt that was quilted with straight lines following the shapes in the quilt and I really loved the way it looked, so I copied it for this quilt.  I quilted with a variegated blue thread.  Can you see the quilting lines in the picture below?

 We bound the quilt with a navy binding and it brought the whole quilt together.  The backing is a beautiful light blue/dark blue print but unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it.

Here is the finished quilt, I just love the way it looks!