Kushukuru Quilt

Today I’m excited to share my #giftkushukuru quilt, featuring Jessica Swift’s new Kushukuru collection for Art Gallery Fabrics. The word “kushukuru” is used to express deep gratitude in Swahili, and Jessica asked each participant to make a gift for someone for whom we are grateful.

I’ll be sending this quilt to my good friend Jen and her newborn baby girl. We first met ~20 years ago in college and bonded over the rather unique combo of aerospace engineering and flute playing. (And, in more recent years, quilting!) Life and 2,000 miles between us means that we don’t talk often and see each other in person even less, but there’s something special about friends who have known you since your first days of “adulting.” I’m grateful for her friendship and hoping to see her and meet baby girl soon!

Jessica sent me a fat quarter of each print from her collection, and the bright, saturated purples and corals were so much fun to work with. I added a couple solids from my stash give me enough fabric for this throw-sized quilt. It’s another new design that I came up with to be fat quarter friendly, and I really like how it turned out!

Diagonal straight line quilting is a go-to for me, and I didn’t even attempt fight the urge to use it on this one. I spaced the lines 1.5″ apart, and ran the quilting lines perpendicular to the piecing lines, which I think makes it a little more visually interesting.

I’ve been piecing a lot of quilt backings lately in an attempt to use up some of my stash, but I thought I might have trouble coming up with the right color palette for this one. But I was wrong! I had just enough coral/purple/green for this fun blocky back.

I hope Jen and baby enjoy it!

The stats:

• Quilt measures 50″ x 60″.
• Fabrics are 12 fat quarters from the Kushukuru collection by Jessica Swift for Art Gallery Fabrics plus 3 coordinating solids from my stash. (The peach and green are Kona; the purple is Cotton Couture.)
• Backing is a mix of miscellaneous fabrics and fat quarters from my stash in coordinating colors.
• Binding is scrappy, made from Kushukuru and backing fabric scraps.
• Machine quilted with a walking foot using Aurifil 40 wt (#2024 White).