Modern Courthouse Steps

I so love this idea of taking one traditional block and turning it into a quilt! That's exactly what Denyse Schmidt did in her book Modern Quilts, Traditional Inspiration. 

 The quilt in the book uses solid fabrics, but I chose to bust some of the stash by using prints in analogous colors of orange/yellow, orange, orange/red, red and fuchsia. For the light strips, I used leftover bits of solids in creams and tans.

It's quilted using the #4 serpentine stitch on my Bernina through the middle of each strip. I've played with this stitch for quilting before, but was never happy with the result. The key was increasing the length quite a bit - length of 4 and width of 5 - and I'm super happy with it.

The back is a combination of a solid cream and print with a 1" strip separating them to mimic the 1" strips in the quilt.

After quilting, I was stumped on a binding, but ended up using the leftover solid pieces for a solid scrappy binding.

I'm wondering what other traditional blocks would look nice blown up as a whole quilt?

. . . Cindy