Trinity Rainbow Banners

Apr 20

Written By Ellie Q

This past winter, my church, Trinity Lutheran in Kalamazoo, asked me to create some new banners to hang in the sanctuary. I put together some designs, and we decided on what you see below. I'm thrilled with how they turned out!

This style of quilt is based on the Rainbow Cross quilt I made for Castle Church back in 2019, so I knew just how to get started: lots of improv pieced slabs in a rainbow of colors. If you want to see a tutorial on assembly line slab piecing, click here.

Once I had slabs constructed, I started laying them out on my design wall. I assemble them into horizontal rows, and then join the rows. The random patchwork helps to "hide" the appearance of the rows so that it looks more cohesive.

I did the same with the red, purple, blue and green section. The different here is here is that I had to make two, and I wanted them to have a fairly similar amount of each color, so I built both on the wall at the same time so I could compare them.

The finished pieces:

When I made the Rainbow Cross quilt, I put together a time-lapse video of arranging the quilt on my design wall. You can watch it here.

Diane Oakes machine quilted all three panels, beautifully as usual. Look at that gorgeous texture!

The finishing touch was adding the celtic knot on the center panel. I used Thermoweb HeatnBond Lite Fusible Adhesive to apply the shape with raw edge fusible applique, and then I zigzag stitched the edges to secure them.

I didn't want the "line" of a binding around the edge, so I used a facing technique. It had been a while since I'd done a facing, so I followed this excellent tutorial.