OMFG BACON Quilt for Tawny

My friend LOVES bacon. I mean, really loves it. When I got an invitation to her birthday party, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. A bacon quilt. She *needs* this in her life, clearly. With a month til her birthday, could I pull it off? Fortunately for me, there was one other person who knew bacon quilt needed to be a thing.

 My trusty project book.

A quick google search led me to this post by Barbie Mills over at The Quilting Mill. I would have never come up with using Dresden wedges to make wavy bacon. Thank you Barbie for being a genius and saving me the trouble of trying to figure out how to make bacon happen. I used her technique for the bacon, but put my own spin on the whole.

For the letters I hand drafted them to be 8x10 inches. Then I cut them out of fusible webbing. Fusible webbing basically makes it so you can iron your fabric to another fabric and it'll stick.

This quilt came out 56" x 60" which is pretty darn close to the 60x60 I was aiming for. For my bacon I used three shades of red from Artisan Batiks Prisma Dyes Mottled. The fatty strips are just a cotton broadcloth in Natural. I thought if would be funny to have the background be silver like a pan, but it's also just a cotton broadcloth. The letters are some bright orange patterned cotton that I've had for awhile. The backing is Kona Cotton in Fuchsia because my friend loves her some bright pink. The binding is black cotton.

Though New England winters are brutal, I didn't want this to only get used when it was -5 out so I went with a low loft 80/20 cotton/polyester batting. I machine quilted this on my old domestic machine. I don't have the patience or technique for hand quilting anything larger than a crib quilt, and I've yet to tackle long arm quilting. That's on the list to learn this year though. All that said, I did end up hand stitching all the letters to make sure they didn't come up around the edges.

And I did finish it just in time! There was much jumping up and down and shouting when she unwrapped it :)