Hey Grandma! A Finished Quilt Top

It's AHIQ time again and I was determined to work on the border for Hey Grandma! Ultimately I settled on the endless mountains style of free form blocks by Sujata Shah. I wanted a wedge look border {but not especially spiky looking} and her methods always seem very  'doable' to me.

Hey Grandma! a completed quilt top!

The other thing that was important in the making of this quilt was that I didn't intend to buy any new fabrics whatsoever. Everything had to come straight out of the stash totes. Just a little extra challenge for me in making this oldish looking quilt! And so the light blue fabric with the medallion looking flowers ended up being the background fabric of choice. And wowsers, was it busy.

Free cutting the rectangles and then sewing the wedges

So much so that I had to wince when auditioning the completed border sections. It looked spotty and drab and actually, very disappointing. Nothing like the original mock-up seemed to indicate!

Auditioning the border lengths

After sighing a lot and feeling very put upon for having to make adjustments to my brilliant plan, I finally came up with the idea to try a very thin, hot pink sashing. Trying to break up the flow of many, many pink spots and maybe refocus the eye a bit?

Hmm... Maybe needs a narrow sashing strip?

Which I think worked very well. It might not be the perfect plan, but it solved my most pressing problem. With just that little tweak, everything started gelling again. If I had my choice, many of those green wedges would be the darker colors as that's what seems to work the best. However, since I was working directly out of my stash--this is all there is folks! Yep! I have run out of these sour, citrus colored green fabrics in a hurry. Probably making my youngest son very happy as he thinks they are a bit of an ugly green!

And finally a completed top!

Sorry about not showing the entire quilt top laying flat on the floor, but the table still has the leaf in it since Thanksgiving weekend. It's been insane around here lately, all the company and comings and goings. I am currently drowning in laundry and desperately need a grocery shopping trip as well. We had such good times though, thoroughly enjoying all the company, wonderful food and excellent visits. It was absolutely wonderful too that most of the big crowd moments were at my mom and dads. Is that terrible of me to actually admit to feeling that way? Our house was a madhouse as it was. If all the extended family had been in and out of our smaller home, I would have rented a motel room!

Not exactly what I was expecting, but I like it anyway....

My hands were literally itching to get in some hand work by late last week, but it never seemed to be a good time to bring out the quilting. So I resisted and just settled in to enjoy the time with family.

No holiday is complete without some drama and unfortunately for us, we had a boatload of it on Thanksgiving morning. About 4:30 in the morning, my sister woke my husband and I up to tell of smoke gathering upstairs. It was a very scary twenty minutes or so, trying to figure out where the smoke was coming from and if we needed to call the fire department. After the household was gathered outside, my husband and brother-in-law turned off the electric and systematically checked for where the burning electrical smell was originating. Thankfully they eventually narrowed it down to the furnace underneath the house and after a phone call asking our oldest son to please come help {he's a heat and air tech}, it was determined that the fan motor had frozen and was smoldering. Poor guy, having to get an emergency call out on his day off! Such a huge relief to find the origination and also, to have the least amount of damage done while finding it. The fire department would have quickly solved the problem, but the damage would have no doubt been extreme!

So between the three men, the problem was quickly addressed and by 6:00 the women were back in bed {or to the couch and recliners if they had been upstairs} and the men went off to the restaurant for breakfast. After a day of fans blowing air out the open windows and upstairs doorway, most of the smoke smell had dissipated and things returned to normal. Whew! So much adrenaline. I can't hardly take it anymore! All of the adults were emotionally drained, but nevertheless, we were all especially thankful the rest of the weekend. I'm quite sure things could have been a whole lot worse!

Back to the quilting--I'm linking up with Kaja and Ann for AHIQ #27. So glad I still have everything needed to quilt! This was a fun exercise in that the improv. was very planned, there wasn't a great deal of waste and Sujata's directions made for very easy block joining. My after-holiday, is-the-house-going-to-burn-down, fuzzy brain syndrome needed something exactly like this. Hopefully next time will be the improv. string baskets done in a postage stamp style block. I'm definitely ready for more improv.!