The Rainbow ZigZag

After my 1st two quilts I had a dream of making a rainbow quilt.  I'm drawn to rainbows for alot of reasons.  Like with my previous quilt, I found a fabric on day that was the motivation for this project.  It was the yellow print on the right hand side.  It was the only one the fabric store had, but luckily the internet saved me once more.  I think I had to order the other colors from 3 different stores, but I eventually collected them all. I went back and forth alot on what color to use between my stripes.  I wanted to use white, but that seemed silly for a quilt that was going to be used by a small child who sufferes (suffered?) from nosebleeds.  I had finally settled on a cream when I went to the store for their annual solids sale.  Then I got lucky and they didn't have the right kind of cream and so I bought white :)

This pattern was pretty sane with the amount of cutting.  It started with strips of each color.  It was at this point that I finalized the rainbow layout.  The purple doesn't photograph very well - but it is a VERY intense purple and so I decided to just have one stripe of it.  

For some reason, I got so caught up in sewing this quilt that I failed to take pictures of it at each stage like I'd planned.  Here it is part way through being pieced  It's the best I have....

All pieced.  I was in love.  

So then I sat with the top in my "in progress" basket for months.  I had the back (flannel I got from a destash), I had the batting (an old very thin duvet from my MIL) but I could not figure out how I wanted to quilt it or bind it.   For awhile I thought I wanted to free motion quilt.  So I ordered a foot for that and waited.  Then I decided that would kill the wonderful lines I'd worked so hard to make line up.  I considered buying thread in each color to quilt the color zigzags....  I waited for awhile until there was a sale on nice quilting thread.  But then that seemed ridiculous.  I finally settled on quilting the white sections in straight lines 1/4" in from the seams.  The result was a wonderful slightly puffy top.  The color stripes really pop! 

The binding was the next issue.  How to bind a rainbow quilt!  Should I make a stripped binding?  Should I alternate colors?  Should I try to have colors line up somehow?  I thought about pink along the top and purple along the sides...  Would that work?  Would it look silly?  Should I order more of the green and blue (I'd accidentally ordered the wrong amount the first time - so I didn't have leftovers...   :( )  I really wanted a wide binding and I didn't have enough fabric to make that happen.  So, I went for the best I had.  I settled on using the purple flowers in a thin binding. 

And the rainbow quilt came to life.  It is a truly cozy soft quilt and it is well loved.