Another blue and orange quilt

I finished a fair few quilts late last year, and in the first half of this year.  But then stuff happened.  Some of which was moving house and involved packing up all the sewing gear for a number of weeks.  The new place has a nice sewing space, and while it is not fully set up, I have finally been able to get back to quilting.

Before the whole move thing, I had started another blue and orange quilt, though nowhere as complicated and time consuming as the last one.  I had a half jelly roll of assorted orange prints, and decided to make the Kisses Quilt Pattern by SewCanShe.  Given all the orange / yellow strips were patterned and quite bright, I decided to go with a plain blue background.

The strips were cut, and the blocks went together very easy (though those pinked edges on the orange pieces were a pain sometimes).  I spent a fair while laying out the blocks and rearranging in order to avoid having the same fabric in close proximity in different blocks.  The quilt top was pieced together in three sections, as I hadn't decided how I was going to quilt it, and smaller sections would definitely be easier to fit under my machine.

For something different, I decided to try cotton sheeting fabric as the backing and found a similar plain blue to use.  Jumping ahead - the cotton sheeting was a bit cheaper than quilting cotton, and only marginally heavier and different in texture, so I think I might use it again depending on the quilt.  

So, the top was in three pieces, I had backing and batting... and then everything got packed away for a couple of months.  But recently, once I was mostly settled into the new place, and the new sewing room was as good as it was going to get until I get a new piece of furniture I have my eye on, I took advantage of a day off work to baste the everything together.  But then it then took forever to figure out how to quilt.  Thread colours were easy (leftover orange from the last blue and orange quilt, and an almost perfect match blue for the background), but just couldn't decide on a pattern.  I ended up doing a random meander through the orange crosses, and a sort of tangled blue ribbon thing through the background.  It'll do.  Once the sections were quilted (leaving a few inches at the internal seams), the joining process then took place, same as I'd done for the Sugaridoo QAL, but this time on the diagonal.  A bit of hand sewing, and a bit more quilting in the newly joined parts, and I was practically done.  I even found I had just enough background fabric left over to use as the binding.  Bonus.

Super keen to get to piecing a new quilt top, especially with some holiday time coming up.