Jaime's "Put a Bird On It" Echino Quilt

As many of you know, I love Echino. Echino fabrics are the designs of Japanese fabric designer Etsuko Furuya. They are vibrant, bright, and bold and often feature all sorts of amazing animals such as zebras, leopards, owls, peacocks, and the ubiquitous bird. In fact, there are so many birds on Echino fabrics that I now refer to this quilt as my "put a bird on it" quilt in honor of the hilarious Portlandia skit. Echino releases 2 fabric collections per year, and it is always a happy day when those boxes arrive. For 2 years now, I have been collecting 1/3 yard cuts of all of my favorite prints. With the arrival of the latest collection, I finally had enough Echino fabrics to make this quilt.
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Oh joyous day! This quilt is so bright and colorful, I absolutely love it. Echino prints are often large scale so I had to choose a design that would show off the prints and allow me to feature large panels of my favorites. I decided to do a simple strip quilt design. I cut my fabrics into 3 different widths and kept the lengths totally random. Once I had all my strips pieced, I decided the quilt needed a bit of solid cream to seperate things and make the prints pop a little more. Because all of Echino fabrics are a cotton/linen blend, I used our un-dyed cotton/linen Essex fabric for this.

For the back, I used the new 62" wide Echino sheeting. That means I only had to seam this queen sized quilt once down the back - yay! All Echino fabrics are printed with the same signature eggplant selvedge so I choose this color for my binding.

And now for your viewing pleasure, here are my kitties enjoying the new quilt. Kitties and quilts! Kitties and quilts!!