Vintage Lily

It was rainy, gray day when I tried to take these pictures. Really a shame, because this {now finished} quilt top looks much more vibrant than the pictures might indicate. Vintage Lily was started sometime in the fall of last year. Kaja got me started on this particular color palette with two different quilts of hers that just sorta pulled me in and made me long to play.

Vintage Lily is a finished quilt top!

At first there was a fabric stack {probably started much earlier in the year?} pulled directly from my stash of course. That simmered for a very long time. It slowly attracted like-fabrics into the stack, and occasionally, kicked one out that didn't quite gel. I absolutely wanted a old time/vintage feel to the quilt, which isn't as easy as it might seem. Throughout those months, I carefully added in several shirting fabrics. A few came from second hand stores, one directly from my sons closet and another was a shirt he wore as a toddler! There were many vintage-look florals and/or prints tossed in and out, but it wasn't until after the fall quilt show though, that the initial 'start' to this quilt finally happened.

The overall approach to this quilt almost eluded me forever as I had great difficulty in being able to see the entire look and feel in my minds eye. How to start, how to start? Sometimes that is the greatest struggle of all--making sure that those carefully gathered stacks of fabric reach their best potential. It's a very common theme around here. In fact, at this moment in time, there are probably seven or eight stacks of carefully collected fabrics sitting around my quilt room. Just waiting for that perfect storm of inspiration and motivation!

Trying to determine if I like it.....

I used the 'Cultural Fusion' book as to the formula for making the simple improv. blocks in this quilt. There were similar blocks in the Scrappy Tulips quilt, but those little corner bits came straight out of the scrap bin. I loved that particular snowball border solution so much, but wowsers, lots and lots of extra cutting. Very time consuming! Sujata's method, tho involving lots of trimming after the blocks are sewn, is a bit more streamlined in terms of cutting and piecing. This seemed to work very well with the limited color palette going on here too. All I had to do for this 'look', was adjust the cutting in the block formula to get the smaller corners I wanted. The imperfection of the corners {that I love so much} is built right into the formula.

Testing, testing....

And one wonderful thing about getting all the blocks trimmed up after being sewn, is the rows go together very fast. It would've been even faster if I hadn't had to remove one row from each side of the quilt while it was still in the large unit stage. Miscalculation in my rough diagram.*grr  In the end, I didn't like the proportion of the finished quilt top either. There was an exact repeat amount of blocks radiating out from the centerpiece, and in person, it looked a little odd. Even to my no-opinions-about-quilts {haha} husband, it was something that needed changed. This just made me grit my teeth to think of getting out the seam ripper again. Oh just let me think about this for a minute or two, surely there's another solution! And thankfully there was. I decided on a whim to fold the edges of the quilt over and see what it looked like with a smidgen of those rows chopped off.

Making a minor adjustment...

And it was all decided in a matter of minutes. Yes! to cutting the blocks in half at the sides of the quilt! Me, the frugal, don't-want-to-waste-any-fabric-ever kind of quilter, happily chopping off the sides of a quilt. It simply boggles the mind.....

Vintage Lily

Gotta love the end result though. Somehow all the elements that I was originally inspired with translated into a good thing. Makes me feel sorta warm and fuzzy honestly! Linking up to Koka Quilts and JulieLou at sew, stitch, snap, SHARE!