My strings quilt is finished!

As a quilter I certainly have my favorites. This one is definitely toward the top of my list. It's a crazy, busy quilt, but with that little bit of white, it somehow just works. It's mostly just scraps, although I definitely bought fat quarters here and there to add in--especially colors I didn't have, like purple. I love looking at it and thinking of other projects as I see various fabrics. This was definitely a labor intensive quilt, but worth the work. I have seen lots of similar quilts on blogs and a stings quilt was on my list of "must-try" quilts. I see it as a pretty big accomplishment.

I used the tutorial from Film in the Fridge to create this one.

My blocks are 8 inches finished. The quilt is 8 blocks x10 blocks with a finished size of about 61" x 77" after shrinkage. It's a little short for a bed quilt. I probably should have added two more rows, but I was pretty much done with the crazy thing after 10.




Now, for the back. Oh, how I love this quilt back. It is my absolute favorite that I have ever designed. It's basically a quilt on it's own (which I have decided I need to start doing to cut down on my overall quilt production and output). It's two quilts in one--much easier to store.

After I finished piecing the front, the idea of the color wheel popped into my head, and I thought it would be a fun way to incorporate more of the same scraps but in a very different way. We have had lots of color discussions in quilt group recently and even have a color wheel class and challenge coming up in a couple months. This is what I envisioned, and I'm so happy it turned out just how I wanted. It also made me realize how many scraps I have as well as where the holes are in my stash. I have very few true blues or true greens, but I do have lots of teals and limey greens. I designed this only with what I had in my stash. I was tempted to go out and buy some fabrics to fill the gaps, but resisted.


I paper-pieced the corners to give it a "rounded" feel since I based my design on a wheel.



As I was working on this one, Ryan asked me what I was going to do with it. I'm still not sure, but it's definitely staying with me. This certainly isn't headed for the gift-quilt pile.

Quilting my Modern Meadows Quilt

I finished piecing this quilt back at about 11:00 at night.  I insanely decided to pin it that same night.  I was up working on it until almost 1:00 a.m.  This was a beast to pin and quilt.  A queen size quilt is huge.

My kitchen floor was barely big enough after moving everything out.  

And after all that pinning, I thought, "Hey, these pins will make for some cool pictures at a wide aperture."  I was already tired, what was an extra 15 minutes to pull out the camera and take some pictures.

Quilting wasn't as bad as I expected, but it was certainly a lot of work.  I actually didn't remove hardly any pins while quilting.  I just quilted around them.  I did quilt over one pin, but didn't even break a needle.  It probably saved me at least an hour or two to leave the pins in until the end.  I might have to do this from now on.  I could do quite large sections without even stopping. 

Organizing...again

When we were kids, my dad made furniture for our rooms. He made me a left-handed desk. I never took it with me when I moved out and assumed it was still at my mom's house. My brother took one of the desks when he got married and just recently mentioned to my mom that the desk was backward with the drawers on the left. We realized he had my desk and made arrangements for him to get his down to his apartment and swap mine and bring it up to my house. He delivered it yesterday, and I'm so excited to have it back. Not only do I love having my desk that my dad made for me, but it also works perfect as a sewing desk in my little space. Now I have a solid desk rather than a rickety folding table that vibrates when I started sewing too fast. I spent yesterday afternoon reorganizing my space, again.


My dad also made this bookshelf for me when I was in college.
I recently organized my fabric stash by color and found it's much more inspiring to me. Seeing all that blue and green fabric makes me want to create monochromatic quilts out of each.

And for those collections of fabric that I'm not ready to separate, I found the perfect solution. For some reason I save all those plastic packages that sheets, curtains, etc. come in. They are the perfect storage solution for stacks of fabric I want to keep together.