It's a Finish!

 Ta-da! Primrose Path is a finished top! Black was the only color that made sense for the outside border, so easy-peasy. The original inspiration was a tapestry or rug {not sure} in black and white. Just couldn't quite bring myself to make a pure black and white quilt. Much too modern for me!

Primrose Path is a completed quilt top now

Thankfully I had enough of a solid to cut out what was needed for borders. Just enough actually. Really surprising as I tend to use it up in bindings and I had already used quite a bit in the sashing borders of this top. Would have loved to use a black fabric with some sort of floral print, but then that would have made things over-the-top busy. Probably. We'll never know now!

A little bit funky, a little bit charming

I love quilts with blocks set in two different directions and this fit the bill nicely. It's not immediately obvious, but I find it kind of sweet and charming.

Probably too graphic to have the cozy vibe I like

This quilt is dark, quirky and not nearly as prim as I normally prefer things to look. Still, it's got a lot of character and will hopefully, fingers crossed, look amazing with hand quilting some day in the future! The size of this quilt is 78" x 82 1/2", so a bit bigger than a large throw quilt. Love having it at finished quilt top stage after years of wondering if I wanted to make this, how to do it? In what colors, yada, yada yada. So it's not my favorite quilt in the whole wide world. That happens sometimes. I'm definitely pleased with how it looks though and happy for the experience!

Lotsa pink in this quilt....

I also finished up the hand quilting on Practice, the improv. strips quilt that I'm gifting to a nephew for his wedding. Big sigh!  I was sweating it a little with all the other things that needed attention this week.

Improv. Practice is finished up!

This quilt was started with the practice strips from the winter quilting meeting two winters ago. I had gathered up a stack of old, less than admirable fabrics for all the gals to practice free cutting on. It seemed easier to let them 'practice' before asking them to cut into their good fabric. My thought was that I wouldn't care how this stack of fabric ended up and it might be interesting to play with strips cut in widths intuitive to other people.

It's been a great practice quilt 

Later on, I used these strips to make my own quilt top, only needing to add in another couple fat quarters of color, plus the cream of course. The cohesion of the cream fabric really helps pull the whole look of the quilt together in my opinion. Good call there as the other fabrics ended up being fairly blendy looking without the offset of the much lighter color.

So glad to see the hand stitching texture come alive

Once again, I was reminded at how much better some fabrics can look when they are cut into smaller pieces. Funny how it can make an 'ugly' fabric look so, so much better!

Very snuggly looking quilt!

Mostly though, I was just done with these particular colors and style of fabric prints. Obviously, I have been spending a lot more time with brighter colors in the past couple years and have gotten away from the overwhelming earth tone phase. That being said, this was a good trip down memory lane, while also allowing me to freely play with improv. strip layout. Absolutely no pressure with this project!

Loving this backing

When I went looking for a suitable quilt top for my very masculine, duck hunting nephew, this quilt top jumped out as the best possible choice. Feeling sorry for his wife to be, I went ahead and added this Kaffe floral to the back. Well, this fabric and about five others. ha! Anyway, it's DONE! Yay me! and now I can start finishing up the two baby quilts and maybe even start on another....

Trying To Get Things Crossed Off the List

I've been hand quilting every evening possible, trying to finish up this improv. strings quilt. It's going to be gifted to a nephew for a wedding gift and time is running out. Not that it has to be given by the wedding date. Oh no. I'm much more relaxed than that. It's just that I don't want to pay postage or risk having it get lost in the mail! So hopefully it will be all wrapped up by next week. Fingers crossed!

Only three more rows to stitch across the quilt!

I have a couple baby quilts sewn up, ready to be sandwiched and quilted. This one hopefully fits the bill for 'baby boy'. I ended up doing a log cabin surround all around the improv. monkey wrench block which was super fun. Being my rebellious self, I  didn't square it up along the way. And then I made matters worse by sort of eyeballing the strip cuts. Free-cutting with a ruler. Mostly straigh-tish!

A little too wonky

When the quilt was approximately the intended size, then I went ahead and squared up the quilt as a whole. {Well, sort of squared it up, it's probably within half an inch!} Loving the sweet, laid back charm to this one already. Something about gingham and floral together that really gets to me! And I used up some pretty old, weird colored blue fabrics that have been languishing in the bottom of the stash totes forever. Feels amazing to find a good use for those! 

Baby Boy quilt finished up

Prickly Pear was sewn into a quilt top just before the boy quilt. I wish the gray pears showed better in the pictures, but you know me. Photography is not my strong suit at all. This quilt ended up being a bit longer than I like at 48". Oh well. It will make a great transitional baby/toddler quilt this way. Always so interesting to try and make these much smaller quilts when I'm completely used to having oodles and oodles of room for a quilt to grow. Honestly, it was a bit hard not to keep this quilt just to see where it could evolve to.*sigh  This mama better appreciate my restraint! Haha  Overall, it's been lovely working with these cut-out pear shapes and seeing where else they could shine. At least I got to have that experience!

Prickly Pear is a finished quilt top

There will be two more baby quilts, but I'm still playing with the fabric stacks. Not gray and beige though! Sounds a bit boring and quilts should never, ever be intentionally dull. Most of us get there accidentally once in awhile without even trying! Just trying to keep things fairly simple and uncomplicated with a generous helping of cozy. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

Primrose Path getting some attention

I did manage to start sewing the Primrose Path applique blocks into rows. Just a little bit more time involved and there should be a finished quilt top. I was very dismayed to realize that the corner triangles did not actually land where I wanted them too. Was trying for the corners to meet up with the closest pink strip, sort of boxing things in. Not going to go back and change things at this point though. This quilt is making me cross my eyes, question my judgment and just generally working to keep my emotions on a seesaw. Do I like it? Yes, no, maybe so.....

So Many Strips

All the applique is finished up and now the borders are attached onto the first Improv. Strips quilt. I needed this one to be a completed top so that I could use it in the demonstration for sandwiching and pinning a quilt. Not that I'm really in the mood to start stitching on this quite yet, but it makes sense to show them the hand quilting stuff on a similar design.

Improv. Strip Quilt #1 top is done!

After all the angst about making this quilt wider than it was tall, I rather like how the deeper borders at top and bottom corral the strips. It makes me smile to see the last little bits added on at the corners. Waste not, want not!

No Wasted Pieces is the new name. Of course!

Or whatever. I was soooo tempted to leave off the 'ces' on the word pieces. How about 'no wasted pie' instead? But yeah. That would have been just a little too much. My husband and daughters weird sense of humor is obviously affecting me now that I'm the only one who rolls her eyes. Definitely missing our oldest daughter these days!

A little bit of applique can go a long ways....

After liking, then not liking, then making plans for adding applique, I'm back to liking the Improv. Strips #2 quilt. Maybe just exactly the way it is. No borders. No added applique. Just this.

Improv. Strip Quilt #2 {Blue} might be done

Maybe even almost loving it. Hmm...

Loving the sparky strips of gold

Could it be added to my skimpy pile of manly quilt top options? I'm wondering.

Kind of a summer day, pond water, blue skies
sort of quilt

I played with the applique idea regardless, just because I had been thinking about it for so long. I had this idea of a stacked, layer after layer of a somewhat formal looking flower. Yep. Spent a couple of hours on the layers and then... it looked a little too feminine. Too suggestive. Ick. So I pulled off about six layers and thought perhaps this would work.

Thinking about an applique addition

Then I switched up the leaves to something darker and auditioned it again. Yeah. It's not quite right. I'm not sure what's going to happen here now and like I said, it might just be better without any applique at all. Time to let it simmer.

Or not?

Last nights quilt meeting was a lot of fun! These are six of the ladies who have made it through to quilt top stage {or almost} and I couldn't be prouder. They have really been working hard to get through all the phases up till now. Two more gals couldn't make the meeting last night and then there is one more straggler who is waaay behind, but still wants to keep in contact and perhaps move along at a slower pace. Three total drop-outs for various reasons that I don't think had anything to do with me. Not too shabby! Right? 

I love the different personalities everyone brought to the quilt project. So interesting to make similar but different quilt tops all at the same time. I didn't even end up showing them my completed Improv. Quilt Top #2 because we had so much information to get through and really, this night was about them.*Whew  It feels so good to see them at this stage and see that yes, what I have been showing them {and teaching} actually works in reality, not just theory! Can not even tell you how happy this makes me seeing their smiles!

These ladies did so good!

I've been working on a little tiny bit of applique lately {such as the 'no wasted pieces stuff', but otherwise, have been practically drowning myself in strip sewing. After I made up my mind to play with the class demo strips, it almost became a compulsion to finish it out. Just wanted to make the effort and then throw all the little bits away and be done.

Calling this one 'Practice'

I really thought there would be more sashing or border work between the rows as the quilt started doing the medallion thing, but it just never looked right after the middle portion was sewn together. Okay, that's fine. 

I played and played one afternoon with the sets of strips, mixing up the colors in the first two outside borders. Played with the scale by folding the auditioned rows under seeing if skinnier rows looked better or not. Finally got a plan figured out and then, at row two, totally forgot that I intended to make the top and bottom portions be about three and a half inches longer so as to end up with a rectangular quilt.*sigh  I couldn't believe it when I laid out my finished quilt and saw that somehow I had ended up working on auto-pilot and yep! Cut and sewn the outside rows an identical width all around the quilt. Uggh... 

The third outside border doesn't look as
awful as I expected

I went to bed that night pretty irritated with myself and disappointed with the quilt overall. It could have looked so good! But then I got to thinking and you know what? This quilt is not anything special. It's not something that I've spent months thinking about and wondering how to instill a certain 'vibe' and look into. It is exactly what the name implies. Practice. 

So I laid it out on the floor again and took all the cut off portions and started to play again. Eventually I decided to trim those shorter portions down to the {almost} shortest length and make two long border pieces out of those. Whatever that size ended up being? That was it, gonna have to work. Only had to use the seam ripper on two different block units and replace super short strips with a new one.

Looking much softer in the right light...

And that was that. Instead of two strippy borders around the center of the quilt, the top and bottom ended up with three. Wallah! Super interesting quilt to play with just in making-do, finding good spots for terribly blah fabrics, how the look changed so quickly by reducing strip lengths in a border. That sort of thing. Fun to pursue but now I'm done, almost exhausted with it all. Ready to move on to more compelling colors of fabric and do my own thing again! Or is this maybe more my thing than I realize? Just winging it and figuring out how to make things work? Whatever. It definitely doesn't hurt anything to try!

 

Just Trying For Some Forward Momentum

Just trying to finish up the quilt top for the improv. quilt meetings. My colors are a little more blendy than most of the others in the class, but you know me, always trying to play with color. Sometimes it turns out wonderfully and others, not so much. This feels like a bit of both. Still on the fence about adding an applique centerpiece though. Some days I fiercely want to. Other days I just want to move on.

Starting to sew the rows together!

I left the project stacked up in the single strips for awhile. Just seemed like more effort than I wanted to expend when it came to cutting them all the same length. Then, once I made the time, it wasn't that big a deal. Isn't that usually the case? Thankfully I had a huge chunk of quiet time when it came to laying them out on the floor and figuring out where all the cuts needed to go. So much easier to do that part without distractions!

Too pretty to sew or maybe that's a good excuse...

As I will need the first {demo} quilt top ready to go for the next meeting, it was time to address the border situation. I had used every bit of the cut strips possible and in doing so, ended up with a quilt that was 1" wider than it was tall. Very weird proportions that were not to my taste at all. Yes, it could have been easily turned to the vertical presentation, but that's not what I wanted!

Always better with applique

So borders it will be. I cut and sewed narrow borders onto the sides and then decided to applique words onto the much wider bottom border. I have four or five applique projects prepped and ready to go and what do I do? Throw something right in the middle of it all and try for a rushed finish! In this pic, nothing is sewn down there yet, but I'm working on it. Word by word, letter by letter. The applique fabric used was that interesting light lavender mauve fabric that started the entire color palette. Looking pretty washed out in this picture but I can assure you that it looks way better than it might seem.

Starting to come together

Remember the new project? After playing around with the practice strips the other day, I came up with this idea for layout. Because the blocks only finish out at 9", 16 blocks make it way too small for an entire quilt. I took the remaining strips and cut all the really wide ones in half. Then I added another two fat quarters and a couple remnants of others. Still have to cut more cream strips, but the plan is to make a whole border surround with a longish strippy coin look. 

The not-very-exciting-looking strips

It's not the most 'wowza' quilt ever, but I'm actually really enjoying the work. More so than the improv. quilt meeting project at this point! I mean, who likes sewing the rows together? I think it's the open ended results, the already cut strips, the Gee-Bend vibe and now {moving forward}, maybe the medallion layout problem solving. It's been fun to see if I can make anything interesting out of these very 'blah' fabrics. The good thing is, I've been bemoaning for awhile the absolute lack of manly looking quilt tops in the drawers. Once in awhile I want to gift a quilt to a guy and it just seems so silly to give them a girly look quilt! So yeah. Win, win. Making lemonade out of lemons and all that.