One Off the UFO List

The first half of the year was all about new starts.  Two of the three 2023 projects have made it to the finished quilt top stage.  So for the last half of the year I'm prioritizing moving some quilts to the finished quilt stage.  The first big hurdle in that plan was getting Unity prepped to go out for quilting.  Unity was started in April of 2020 when Bonnie Hunter offered the Sew-In-Place quilt along to help all of us cope with the Covid pandemic. I made the last stitch to the binding on Tuesday, September 19th.  

Unity is far from perfect, but I learned a lot during the construction of this quilt. I perfected stitching an accurate quarter inch seam by the time it was fully constructed.  The quilt has a couple of puffy parts because I didn't have that down early on.  I'm eternally grateful to Trudy, she was still able to deal with those imperfections with the quilting.  My version is a bit different from Bonnie's.  I used a different block for the last full pieced border.  One because I didn't really like Bonnie's version and two, the Four X Star block has a lot fewer pieces. By the time I got to that point, I was ready to just be done. 

One of my "rules" for Bonnie's mystery quilts is that the fabric has to come from the stash.  The black with the colored flowers has been in the stash for years, so it was the first pull.  The other goal for Unity was to use a color palette that was new to me.  That's how the yellow and green were selected.  This quilt has always made me think of sun flowers, so that's what I stuck with as the name (the Latin version)

The green made such a good frame for the rest of the quilt that I stuck with that for the binding. 

The backing was purchased during one of Connecting Threads end of year sales. 

The photo doesn't convey the colors really well, but it does show off the quilting.  Since this quilt had so many piecing problems I told Trudy to keep it simple.  

Unity wasn't one of my better executed projects, but I learned a ton.  I will be rejecting any background fabrics that ravel very badly.  That's one reason why it took me forever to finish this project. I tried early on to fix some of my piecing problems, but the background fabric didn't take well to being unstitched and then restitched.  I had to replace a few pieces of background during that process.  Then clean up of the top was really a nightmare due to all the loose strings on the back.  Even with all the problems, I'm happy with the finished quilt and very glad to have it off the UFO list.  

Linking up with Design Wall Monday and Patchwork & Quilts.  

Rainbow Scrap Challenge - Radiant Red Stitching

What a week!  The first full week of work after the holidays is always rough for some reason.  It was nice to get home last night and head to the sewing room for some in depth stitching therapy.   I was in the mood for some mindless stitching, this year's Rainbow Scrap Project seemed to be just the thing to work on. 

I was able to finish off the first two blocks last night. 

 Modified Wild and Goosey
Based on Bonnie Hunter's pattern in Addicted to Scraps

These blocks are 3.5" squares, that's relatively tiny for me. Each block has 13 pieces, so it takes a bit to finish off one square.  Even with all the tiny pieces, these two were a lot of fun to make.  The planned layout needs 320 blocks.  In addition to the red, the plan is to make pink, magenta, purple, blue, turquoise, green, yellow and orange blocks.  So with 320 blocks in 9 different colors, that's about 36 blocks of each color.  With those kind of stats, this project is likely to take a couple of years. We'll see if I can move it along a bit faster, but even if I can't, it's using up some of those little scraps, so how can that be a bad thing? 

Linking up with Angela over at Soscrappy today and linking up with Cynthia for Oh Scrap on Sunday.  

Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2019 - A New Project

It's the first Saturday in the new year, which means it's time for new project for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

Angela's color for January is red.  So I pulled out my red scraps and got to cutting. This is what I ended up with.

These are all from my scrap bins. So what  are they going to become?

It's a paper pieced block, one of Bonnie Hunter's patterns, Wild and Goosey.  Black will be the constant, used as the "wings" for the geese.  That block is only 3" finished, so this may end up being a multi year project as the blocks are  fiddly and they are slow to make.  But I've had Wild and Goosey on my quilt plan for the last two or three years, it was time it became a real project.  I think the final quilt will be well worth all the effort.  

Linking up with Soscrappy for the first 2019 Rainbow Scrap Challenge Linky Party.  And I'll be linking up with Oh Scrap on Sunday.