And It's Done

I think that has been the fastest from start to finish for me. I started less than three weeks ago with this quilt, without having a clear idea where I was going, and yesterday it was done. Okay, it's a rather small quilt (only about 110 x 135 cm), but, hey, it's still a quilt!

(Thank you to M for modeling it)

As you can maybe see from the picture, the white portion of the quilt is quilted in straight zigzag lines. For this, a walking foot is worth it's weight in gold, as I had next to no puckering and practically no issues with directional quilting (you know, when the fabric is distorted in one direction or the other, depending in which direction you're sewing)

For the color section I free motion quilted a different pattern for each color (some are better to see in the pictures bellow, some no to good).
- yellow: loop de loop and flowers
- blue: loop de loop and stars
- red: spirals
- black/white: pepples
- green: shells

 I have reused and repurposed maybe 80% of the materials for this quilt (even the batting is put together from bits I had left from other projects). I did buy the white fabric and for the back I used one side of a duvet cover (there was a sale at the Swedish furniture store - one duvet cover is certainly enough for two smallish quilts without any piecing and certainly enough for a full quilt if you don't mind a single seam). So in terms of materials it's probably one of the cheapest I've ever made.
I even remembered to add a label.

Zigzag Quilt Top

The top for the scrappy zigzag lapquilt is done.

I'm loving it!
Now for the back.
I've got eight blocks left over, which didn't fit with the color scheme on the front. If I'd make one more, I could lay them out 3 x 3, frame them in white and then do the rest in black (hmm, need to check how much black I still have in my stash).
Or I just sprinkle the left over blocks all over the back more or less randomly.
Or, hm, I have a pretty good idea on how I'm going the quilt this quilt, any pattern on the background would just be distracting there. So maybe just an uni back? Do I have a piece big enough?
I need to think on this.

Shades of Gray

Last week I showed some scrap patches I've made. There are now quite a few more of those patches (48 to be precise).
I have eight each of five different base colors plus some extras, which won't end up in the little quilt I've decided to make. Aren't they pretty (those are obviously only the black/white and the yellows)?

After some deliberation, sketching and throwing out of other ideas, I've decided on this layout below. I've been wanting to do a quilt like this for some time, and as I was looking for ideas I've thought this would work well with the scrap patches.

 This meant I had to do a few more patches in certain colors, and also that I had to cast out a couple patches which were not fitting in with the rest. This also meant I had to do a quick trip to the fabric store for enough white fabric to make 40 6.5inch squares (the white I had here was juuuuuuust not enough - quick note to myself: buy more white!).

 So far I have made HSTs for the black and white stripe and put it together.
Looks like it might be working.

This won't be a large quilt. Just 44" by 55". Depending on were I'm looking this should work out as a lap quilt. All my quilts (except the babies) have been larger than this.
I'll see.

Fabric Scraps

I have a lot of scraps. Some of them are from projects I've done, another part is because I cannot walk past a scrap basket in a fabric store without diving in and pulling stuff out. And then there are the scrap bags. They seem to simply follow me to the checkout, Don't know how they do it.

At home I have a full drawer dedicated to my scraps (by my definition, everything smaller than 5 x 5 inches is a scrap). I've sorted them by color and normally keep them in zip locked plastic bags.

Yesterday I've pulled out some of the bags and started making patches. The patches are 6.5 x 6.5 inches.

I'm not 100% sure yet what I'm going to do with the patches and how far I'm going to go, but I think those are a pretty good start for something bright and colorful.

1080

1080 is the number of stitches I currently have on my needle. Eventually, this is going to be a table cloth (pattern is the Sun Ray Design aka. Heirloom shawl and knitted in an off-white cotton)