A Boyish Rainbow

I’m the mom to two little monkeys. My big guy is five, and my little guy is in the home stretch to age four. My five-year-old is notorious for being noncommittal (my almost-four-year-old is just notorious in general!). When asked, for example, whether he wants chocolate, vanilla, or chocolate chip ice cream, he doesn’t want to make a choice at all. Why can’t he just have all the options?

It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, that this tendency would affect my plan to make him a quilt. When asked which colors he wanted me to use, he responded enthusiastically, “All of them!” And so the idea of my rainbow quilt was born.

I’m not a rainbow-quilt kind of girl. The complicated rainbow and color-wheel creations of others at times amaze me, but I like a certain simplicity—visually—in my quilts. (Recently, that has meant breaking up colorful fabric choices with chunks of white.) Using my scrap stash and purchasing as little additional yardage as I could get away with, I set myself to creating a boyish rainbow in six bold swaths of patchwork.

I’m really pleased with it—and my son has already used it to build forts, to play superhero (it makes quite a cape), and to snuggle up under and watch a show. 

It’s my first stab at designing my own quilt top. To celebrate, I thought I’d throw my hat into the Blogger’s Quilt Festival ring with it. Take a peek at the other submissions—the quilts on display there would shake anyone out of a creativity doldrums.