Scrappy Bricks Finished!

It can be a good experience to work on something a little outside of your comfort zone, which this quilt was for me, at least color wise!  I bought a design roll of Kate Spain's Honey Honey last summer and used quite a bit of it on some other projects.  What was left was a lot of the bright fabrics that I don't sew with very often.  It turns out that I am getting to be a fan of orange!

I think this quilt has a sweet and spicy look to it with the combination of blues, greens, pinks, and oranges.  I used Cyndy's Scrappy Bricks design idea to put the fabrics together, and added the 1inch black bars to give the bright colors and prints some space from each other.  I decided to back it in a cool, summery blue, and bound it in my latest favorite, black and white polka dots.  I think the binding makes a nice frame for the quilt and ties in with the black sashing bars.  The finished size is about 36 x 40.

Unfortunately I kind of wimped out on the quilting... I was so determined to give some FMQ a go, thinking I could try a couple of simple designs in the bricks, but I couldn't quite get it to look the way I wanted.  So, after unpicking a bunch of quilting, I ended up  just loosely quilting it about 3 1/2 inches through the bricks and along the top and bottom edges of each row, mostly stitch in the ditch.  Hopefully for a small quilt like this, that will be enough.

All in all, it is fun to have a finish for June, and something bright and cheery to hang over the back of a chair.  

On to the next project!

My Favorite Quilt

Like many (most?) quilters, my favorite quilt is usually the current one I am working on, and I really have loved all of my quilts over the years.  It is always fun to think back about them and look at all the ones I have made because each one has been a good experience for many different reasons.

I have been enjoying following along on this month's "My Favorite Quilt" series over at Sew Mama Sew. So I decided to join in!

My favorite quilt is this wall-hanging I made as part of Quiet Play's And Sew On BoM of 2013.

I made this quilt almost entirely with fabric from my stash.  I did have to go back to buy more of the light blue and white stars that I used for the background.  But now I still have quite a bit of it left in my stash for other projects!  I worked on each block month by month through 2013, and then finished it up in November.  Working on it coincided with my getting involved in the online quilting community and starting my own blog.  

I grew so much as a quilter during the making of this quilt.  I had tried some paper piecing before, but not to this extent.  The great thing about the process is that the first blocks were quite easy, but got pretty complicated as time went on.  The last one is the one in the center., and I have lost track of how many pieces it had!  I definitely used my seam ripper a lot during the whole project!

I haven't shown this quilt in any shows, but I did get lots of quilty love from my quilt group that I meet with each month when I showed it to them!

The hardest part of this quilt was figuring out how to quilt it at the end.  Since it is a wall-hanging, I didn't quilt it very much at all, mostly straight lines around each block and inside each block to stabilize everything.  If I were to do anything differently on it, it would be that quilting.

This quilt hangs on the wall in my dining/family room.  I know it was meant to hang in my sewing room, but I was so proud of it when it was completed, that I just stuck it up there and it's still there 6 months later!  It hangs right next to the Little Penguins!

 

 

Thanks for the chance to revisit my favorite quilt!

A WIP for this Week

I have continued to follow along with Quilting is more Fun than Housework's Scrap-a-Palooza series. I finished a quilt based in Cyndy's January idea, and this week I've been working on a quilt based on her June idea.   Of course, she has done a new one every month, but I haven't been able to keep up with that!  No matter how many I actually finish, though, the fun is in getting some inspiration for using my scraps to make pretty things!  Thanks, Cyndy!  Here is what I have so far:

This is from the leftovers of a roll of Kate Spain's Honey Honey that I ordered last summer.   I think it was actually called a "Honey Bun."  LOL!  It is strips that are 5 inches by width of fabric.  I used some of the fabric for a baby quilt for a friend and also as the center of my pearl blocks for the String of Pearls table runner that I made last winter.

It has some fun fabric still left:

 

 

and this fun honeycomb:

 

 

 

I never noticed the bees until I started cutting the bricks for this project!



To put this quilt top together, I cut 7.5 x 5 inch bricks of everything that was left.  I also cut a few half bricks to help offset the rows.  Since the fabric is pretty bright and big, I felt like it needed something to "calm" it down in between the bricks.  Looking through my stash I found some black fabric leftover from a long ago quilt that needed black sashing and borders.  From that I cut 1.5 x 5 inch pieces to place between each of the bricks.

So far, I have just made the rows and have it laid out on my design "wall" floor!  It is small - only about 40 x 43 inches, and I can't quite decide if I should add some black sashing in between the rows.  Any suggestions?  I actually really like it the way it is, and I think it could be a good size for a baby quilt, even though I am not planning on giving it to any babies at the moment!  So far, I have just been thinking of this quilt as a project to practice my quilting skills on!

 

 

Time to put the rows together!

 

Color Me Happy!

Back in April, when I decided to gift this quilt to a special friend, the hardest part of giving it away was that I loved the Color Me Happy fabric so much.  I solved that problem by making a mini quilt out of the fabric I had left over.  I had been wanting to work with HSTs again, and this was the perfect opportunity.

I backed it with a fat quarter of Glimma by Lotta Jansdotter that I had in my stash, a happy accident, since I don't usually pay attention to the designer when I am buying fat quarters!  But this was perfect for this project.

 

 

 

 

I also used the leftover navy and green polks dots for the binding.  I love being able to make a whole project out of my stash. 

 

 

A quick and simple table-topper for my dining room!

 





Linking up with Needle and Thread Thursday.