This quilt is called Serious

Greetings from the Tilkunviilaaja studio! May I introduce to you my first quilt finish of 2026: Serious quilt (Totinen in Finnish). She is basking in the wintry sunshine on the snow that is full of children’s footprints. We were doing the photoshoot on the top of a small hill where children come to go down it on their sleds.

I saw a quilt like this in completely different colours and decided to make a version with a very dark background. My 16-blocks would also feature certain coloured squares from corner to corner. I knew that I would find enough fabrics for this quilt in my stash.

These were the first blocks sewn, early in October 2025. At this point, I was very inspired!

Indeed, I had no shortage of suitable fabrics for the squares:

And yet, even with a sizeable stash, I could not help but buy an exciting mystery bag from the local quilt shop Tilkkunen. I happened to see that a limited number of such bags was available and I just could not help myself. This is what the bag looked like:

I’m a notorious shelver – but this time, I opened the bag right away and cut almost all of the strips into 2,5-inch squares. For once, I did not SAVE the fabric, I used it.

My process was to design every 16-patch one by one – and the only rule was that there would be that diagonal row of squares. And yes, I had planned the order of colours beforehand and calculated how many diagonal reds, oranges, and so on I would need.

In addition to red diagonals, I had blocks with pink ones and blocks with yellow ones.

Here I’m testing how the orange diagonals would look.

Here I’ve started to lay out the blocks into a pleasing design. First, I would lay them out at random – only taking care of the diagonals. Then, I would move blocks around if the same colours were touching each other, or if the rhythm between the dark and the colourful blocks was sketchy.

After I managed to sew all the blocks together, I had to wait a few more days until taking pictures because there was continuous rain right at that time. But a drier day arrived on 4 November 2025, and I was able to find a relatively safe spot where to spread the top.

I think this picture looks great, but I was a little disappointed to see how dark the darks were. At first, the only ideas I had for the name for the quilt centered around the idea of “soot”.

But hey, one cannot always win – not even every time, like the Mother Moomin says.

Soile at Töölön Tilkkupaja quilted the top very quickly, but after that, my progress stopped. Perhaps because this quilt was not my favourite, it had to wait in its quilted but untrimmed and unbound state for two months before I started the finishing work. I had the black-and-white binding strip ready for at least a few weeks too. Or so I thought!

I don’t know how this happened, but the binding strip was too short. I found out when I was approaching the end of the first round. I had to cut a piece and lengthen the strip to get to the finish. Luckily I found the fabric quickly and easily from my stash.

The backing fabric of the Serious quilt is from Töölön Tilkkupaja, and its romantic roses offer an interesting contrast to the dark front side. The fabric is a wideback Kaffe Fassett, with a wonderfully smooth and luxurious feel to it.

Serious is my first quilt finish in 2026 ( ! ).

The quilting pattern looks great on the Serious quilt, and – as so many times before – the quilting improved the look of this quilt by A LOT. I did not like the finished top much, but now that it’s quilted, it is ok.

Here you can see the official portrait of my Serious quilt, which is about 178,5 cm x 235 cm (around 70” x 92,5”) in size:

I always like to encourage rather than criticise myself, but I still want to share the two things I’d do differently were I make a new version using similar blocks.

Firstly, the blacks in between the colourful block stripes are too dark and/or too wide. They look dramatic but like a void. A dark gray would probably been a better choice. I just did not have enough of the suitable grays in my stash. I used what I had.

Then, I sewed my blocks to run from upper left to lower right, which to me looks like the pattern is going down. This was the way the blocks were in the picture I saw, but I should have known better. 

I should have made the diagonals run from lower left to upper right instead – upwards in a more positive way!

Serious is the 94th quilt that I’ve finished in my recorded history (some of the makes are smallish toddler/baby quilts though). I wonder if I’ll reach the 100-quilt milestone this year!