Bordered Diamonds

When I saw the Bordered Diamonds quilt in Kaffe Fassett's book, Simple Shapes Spectacular Quilts, I knew immediately that it would be a perfect quilt for a thank you gift for my aunt.  Never mind that my stash did not contain many large floral prints.  My first thought was that I would just buy a kit, and Glorious Color has fabric kits to make two different versions of the quilt.  This is their version from the book.  And this is their version from the June/July 2010 Quilt Magazine.

I carefully analyzed each kit trying to decide which would be best.  Then I started thinking about how I liked each version--except for this or that fabric, and how I wanted to use some of my own fabrics, and how I am pretty persnickety about fabric choices, and I finally just gave up and started collecting florals...surely that wouldn't add too much to my stash?

Here's a view of the cut diamonds and border strips and of my lovely white board which has been replaced:

And since the directions call for dark diamonds to have light strips, and light diamonds to have dark strips, and the rows to alternate, I photographed them, then changed them to black and white to determine the values, as shown here by the strips (although these are the mediums to darks primarily):

But after trying to lay them out as directed, I decided to do my own thing when the light/dark thing didn't work, and just evenly separated the colors.  And now, a couple of months later, the blocks of the quilt are all sewn together. Hooray!

 

I needed the quilt to be larger than designed, so it's now waiting for the border fabric to be added.  This is what I am planning on using:

And, having easily spent twice as much as I would have on a kit (what's an extra 1/2 yard here or there?), I now have a very large bin of floral fabrics.  My stash, like my waistline, only seems to grow in one direction....