Blue Scrappy Squares

It's been forever since I finished a quilt.  I've started heaps though.  I did actually finish one last November.  But I forgot to take any photos, and I gave it to it's recipient.

A while back grandma gave me 12 blue fat quarters.  I finally found a pattern on the Jordan Fabric website that I thought would be perfect for it.  It was a Moda Fabrics pattern called Scrappy Squares, and I later realised the blue fat quarters were actually Bella Solids, so it was meant to be.

I don't remember how long it took to get the sixteen patch squares together, but I do remember I had to be absolutely on my game with the scant quarter inch, which I had to test a few times to get right.  

It then took forever to find something for the background Xs.  I didn't want to use another solid, and eventually found a grey denim look fabric at a little shop that is open to the public just a few times a year.

The backing is a rather unfancy blue, but I added in as much of the leftover fat quarters as I could.

I used my vinyl template to test out a lot of different quilting designs, and ended up going for some echo quilting in the Xs and an orange peel in the squares.  I quilted the top in three pieces, and joined the together after, so that only the inch or so either side of the join was left to quilt.

I was 90% through the quilting when I ran out of the particular shade of Aurifil thread.  Xanadu, I think it was.  After a couple of emails I was able to locate a spool at a quilt shop south of the river, meaning I could finally get the quilting finished.

All that was left was to find something for binding, and I found a nice blue/green Devonstone solid at my local quilt shop. And with the weather cooling down, it was a good time to sit on the couch and sew on a label I'd cross stitched using waste canvas, as well as sew down the binding.

I do like this one and now need to figure out where to put it.  The next quilt is almost finished too - just the label and binding to go.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Aves 2018 - Week 6

Image
This year I thought I would take on a quilting challenge, so I signed up for Aves , a Block of the Week quilt by Kathryn Kerr of Green Avenue Quilts . Every Sunday starting 21 January 2018, I receive the instructions to complete one block for the quilt. The plan is to complete the current block before the next one is released. Week 6 The block for week 6 looked easy peasy, but knowing where how it fit in with the rest of the quilt, I had a feeling it might be the last straightforward one for a while. I did a little bit every night, and was finished by Wednesday evening. During the process, I couldn't figure out why some of my squares were not working out quite to the size I expected, and were running a little small.  I did a test on my scant quarter inch, sewing a number of tiny pieces together and seeing the size of the strip I ended up with, but there were no issues there.  I'm now thinking it was a particular small ruler I was using, so I've put it away and will ...
Read more

Aves All Done

Image
The first finish of the year is actually the quilt that started this blog.  Yep, I finally got around to quilting it. Back in 2018 I thought I would take on a quilting challenge, so I signed up for  Aves , a Block of the Week quilt by Kathryn Kerr .  For 45 consecutive Sundays, I receive the instructions to complete one block for the quilt and do a bit of construction on the way. For the past five years the quilt top has been sitting in my spare wardrobe, along with a pieced backing and enough binding to go around.  But I have not quilted it because it was huge and heavy, and I had no idea what to quilt.  Until one night last year.  I couldn't sleep, so I was lying in bed thinking about quilts as usual and suddenly I had an idea.  Concentric circles. Next morning I pulled the top out, had a look and a think and figured it would work. Because the top was so heavy (given there are so many bits of small fabric), I decided to only put enough wadding b...
Read more

Aunt Blanche's blocks

Image
  A while back grandma gave me some blocks that Aunt Blanche had put together at some point.  I had no idea what to do with them.  There wasn't enough to make a quilt from, so I thought about a table runner.  That didn't seem to work either so there they sat for a very long time. I pulled them out again earlier this year, probably after watching too many Youtube quilt videos, and decided to use the free version of PreQuilt to help me figure out what to do with the blocks.  After some messing around I came up with a layout that made a small lap size quilt.  The layout used the nine similar blocks and a lot of negative space.  And I had just the right Liberty fabric I'd picked up from the usual place when they were having a sale.  With so few pieces, this was the quickest and lightest quilt I had put together in a while.  So I took the opportunity to piece it on the antique Singer. There were three other blocks in the collection, but they were...
Read more