Happy New Year!

I've been remiss recently. I've had some good excuses - I was in costume-mode for a couple of months this fall, making outfits for a full production of Romeo & Juliet, where my output was at least as prolific as a contestant on Project Runway with the added excitement of holding a full-time job at the same time.

I only returned to the sewing machine last week, where I banged out a quilt top for the Harvest Quilter's 2011 challenge. I am still mulling over how to quilt it. I will have to get a move on with that; the quilt show is in March. The challenge fabric is the blue & white stripe with the red flowers. I think the piece I was given was slightly less than 1/8 yard, and it's something that I would never purchase for my stash on my own. I might wear a bathing suit made of that print once I lose 60 pounds, but it's definitely not "me".

Other rules for the challenge was the overall size must be under 180" in total circumference, and can not use more than 5 additional fabrics. (The fabrics I've chosen are behind the challenge fabric).

A further constraint that I put on myself is that I could only use fabrics already extant in my stash. I did a little bit of fabric purchasing over the holidays (right after the Hoffman Challenge for 2011 fabric was announced), and I don't have room to store what I bought already. I'm using a medium-blue batik, a dark blue Hoffman print from around 10 years ago that I adore,  and a light-blue fabric from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine collection that came out a few years ago. the red and green were FQ prints that I picked up somewhere along the way.

I designed my quilt in EQ7, using mostly blocks from their block library. The borders are my own design.

The center blocks are called Staccato Corner (and are supposed to be part of a border pattern), the surrounding blocks are Thrifty. The corner blocks in the border are 3" Double Monkey Wrench, and the border design is of my own devising.

Of course, I realized, after it was "too late," that  I should have foundation-pieced the Double Monkey Wrenches, as working on tiny blocks like that is challenging to get things perfect. One would think I knew this already from my Chaos Theory quilt.

 

The other issue is the center. As you may have noticed, there are 32 separate pieces of fabric coming together in one single point at the center of this quilt. I don't think I will be able to get my quilting foot under that at all when I quilt this, so I need to come up with something that doesn't require stitching around the center of the quilt.


The center blocks were paper pieced.

I am also writing up this pattern. This time I took some decent notes as I was constructing each block, so I should have the pattern done fairly soon.

I have some ambitious plans for quilting in 2011 - there are 2 local guild shows this spring that I'll be making new quilts for, and I really want to get something entered in the Hoffman Challenge this year, and some other surprises in the works. I also plan to blog more regularly. So, till next time, keep on quilting!