Boston Streets quilt top

    There is one more nephew on my husband's side that needed a quilt made by me.   While looking through the Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns again, I found Boston Streets. After making a sketch of the design using graph paper (and actually considering the possible purchase of EQ 7 or something else like it), I decided to use Microsoft Word for the first time to play with the layout.  Badskirt Amy had a tutorial for visualizing quilt tops.

    In Word, I drew a 5x7 block since this pattern repeats every 5 rows and I was going to use 7 columns.  I imported it into Publisher because I knew I could convert the document to a jpeg and highlight all of it and click a button to treat it all as one object (not 25 squares).  After making it all one object, I pasted it 3 times to make the layout.  Then, with a series of rectangles, I filled in the outer grays.   Mainly I did this to see if I liked the proportions of the quilt or if I needed to have only 6 columns instead.  I did not bother changing the tones of the oranges to match the fabric (orange ombre from Simply Color).

     The quilt top was finished today.  I did not stick to any set path for the different shades.  In the encyclopedia, not enough of the picture is shown to know that there are any paths that go through the quilt.  I figured I could pretend with the different shades of the ombre fabric after deciding not to use scrappy oranges.   

     Originally I wasn't sure if I was going to use the aqua or the gray for the squares.  I consulted my resident quilt color expert who thought that the darker gray was best and that blue squares were much better than gray squares.  She was not happy to be taken away from watching Magic School Bus at the time and quickly gave her opinion so she could go back to it.  Tomorrow I hope to finish piecing a back for it.