Addie's quilt: Floating corners

Little Miss Addie has been alive for a tad over a week... She is such a cute little girl! Grammie is all excited about helping new mommy out and I'm pretty sure they all had a wonderful long weekend.

It sometimes seems quite extraordinary that Addie's quilt is finished and is no longer in my dining-room-turned-sewing-room. I look at the pictures of the process and must confess end up in a mixture of rejoicing and nostalgia.  Addie's is my first baby quilt ever, and I'm so grateful that her Grammie gave me a creative green light...  It was a blessing to work on her quilt, and I hope she enjoys it for many years to come.

So... here is a floating corner:

So, why is it called a "floating" corner?  Weeeeeell, I really don't know... I know that sometimes, a little splash of color is added to a quilt by inserting a small piece of fabric in an otherwise even background.  In Addie's quilt, these strips are really not connected to any other block; it is as if they were "floating" in the corners...

I thought that strips going in different directions would break up the evenness and give the whole quilt an interesting movement.  What do you think?

And just a little parenthesis...  I added the floating corners because I only had 11 diamonds, so I would have to at least deal with a different corner.  In the end, I went for two floating corners and used the 11th diamond in the back of the quilt.

But just before going to the corners, and in case you would like to know, for the diamonds section, I only added a 2.5" strip to one side of each block.  I then used longer strips of the same width to make rows. That is how the diamonds came together - just one note: only the two central columns (in the picture above) were finished this way.

And here is another view of the same process...

Now for the columns on the sides (remember the pic with the finished top?), I used the scraps that were leftover from cutting the squares. For a quick reference, click here to visit my tutorial on Easy Strip Diamond Blocks, and check out where the scraps came from!  :)

The first step was to add strips of background fabric to each end of the scrap strips, like so:

Notice that the length of the background fabric varies. I was not going for matching edges, so I double checked that the distance between the edge of the scraps and the edge of the background strip were all different.

Even though the scraps are the same size, the uneven effect can be done with varying the length of the background strips.

Here are the first three strips ready to go floating to the quilt!  Make sure that the length is just a tad larger than the length of the corner (basically, one diamond block and 2" more in the background fabric - remember the outer columns in the quilt picture?)

Also, notice that the edge of the scrappy strips don't match at either end.

The next step is adding background strips in between the strips.

 If you end with something that looks like this:

...just trim a little bit in order to have a straight edge and make the rest of the block construction easier.

When you are done, you will have something that looks like this:

Just trim the edges and make sure the final measurements match that of the quilt block:

And here you have it! Floating stripes ready to go into Addie's quilt!  :)

This technique is very easy to use and has a touch of improvisation...  Ultimately, you are making sure that all the leftover fabric is used and it introduces a fun and unexpected element to the composition.  

I hope that you had a wonderful Independence weekend!  

Stay blessed!  :)

Yiya