Rainbow heart quilt top

Rainbow Heart Quilt

When my daughter was 3, I made her a rainbow heart cake for her birthday.  When I asked her what quilt design she wanted, she said, "a rainbow heart quilt".  Each heart block has 49, 2 inch squares.  This will be the first to be quilted on my new Sunshine 16 quilting machine.

January 2018 Update

Debra asked for some pointers and so I typed up a few instructions and figured I'd update this orignial post in case anyone else is interested.

 I really still love this quilt  My daughter uses it for her 10 month old baby son to sit on with his toys.  It's well washed and a little faded but still charming!

    Here are a few instructions:

The squares finish at 1 1/2" (so 2" unfinished).  Originally, I started with scrappy long strips of one color family and made the hearts each in one colorway with complementary color borders (like a scrappy purple heart would have a green border) but when my daughter saw the blocks, she said, I thought you were going to make the hearts multi color and so I took apart parts of the blocks and put them back together with another color block and they mostly have just 2 or 3 colors, but you can still see some strips of greens, yellows, or purples in the background of each block, which helps the hearts to stand out.

    I did sew about 3 strips together and then sliced them up so I was rarely actually sewing little 2" squares together (too time consuming).

For Each Block

1.  Gather colorful scraps and cut into 2" strips (or you could make them wider)  Divide the colors into "heart" and "background" colors. Just make sure that your background colors are different than your heart colors for each block.  You can have hearts and backgrounds in the same color, just not in the same block.  

2.  Make a 9 patch from heart colors

3.  Make two heart corners.  Two strips of 3 squres with half square triangle on two corners.  One of the half square triangles needs to be of heart color and one of background color.

4.  A background four patch in the top (one square makes the V indent of the heart)

5.  A background border 

6.  Make as many blocks as you wish and sew together.  I put mine together on point.  I added a blue border, another border of rainbow squares and bound it in green.