In a Flurry

Better late than never...  I finished up this cute little Christmas quilt.  After almost no snow this winter we suddenly got six inches of snow last weekend, the perfect backdrop for a photo shoot.  I cashed in some of my birthday chips to enlist my DH as a quilt stand.  Good thing, it hasn't stopped snowing since and now we'd be buried under a snow drift!

I started this quilt right before we left for Christmas vacation.  I was in desperate need of some mindless sewing after all the deadlines and fussiness of my holiday sewing.  I spotted this collection of Kate Spain holiday charm packs in my stash and got sewing.

I didn't want to deal with anything complicated and wanted to use up as many charms as possible.  I just randomly grabbed pairs of charms, sewed them together and then stuck them on the wall.  Without getting too thinky about it I just kept sewing pairs together into bigger units until I had strips of 12 blocks which seemed like a good throw size.

To stretch things and give all the prints some breathing room I alternated with solid white squares on the odd rows.  I love the almost gingham effect it adds with minimal effort!

For the quilting I just went with straight lines a 1/4" from the seams.  It was a bit tedious but was helped along by the final season of The Closer.

And there's my first finished quilt of 2015...  just in time for Christmas:-)

Linking up to the fabulous Finish it Up Friday by Crazy Mom Quilts and making my first check on the 2015 Finish Along with On the Windy Side.

Quilt Stats:
Finished quilt is 58" x 76"
Fabrics: Solstice, Flurry, and 12 Days of Christmas charm packs by Kate Spain, FSDS Mist.
Batting: Quilter's Dream Orient Bamboo.
Thread: 50 wt. Aurifil in Light Beige (2310).

Finally finished Fig Tree Quilt

Fun Facts about my Figgy HST quilt:

Made with fabrics currated from these fabulous collections by Joanna Figueroa of Fig Tree & Co.: Patisserie, Gypsy Rose, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Buttercup, Fresh Cottons, Strawberry Fields, and Butterscotch & Rose.  Cream solid from Breakfast at Tiffany's.

 Finished Size: 88"x96". This is the biggest quilt I've ever made and it will be a gift for my parents. 

That's 380" of hand tacked bias binding...

 and 408 4"finished half-square triangles.

It took 5 1/2 hours and 9 bobbins to quilt on the longarm at Laurena's.

Progress

My plan for last week worked pretty well.  My L'Amour Twister is done and can disappear in to the closet until next Valentine's Day.

I basted the Amy Butler Love quilt and it will hopefully get quilted this week.  I even finished the hand quilting project I was hoping to get to so that's ready for a binding.  I didn't trim all those HSTs, but I decided it would be less tedious to trim them as I sewed the rows together.  Plus I'm still playing with layouts so they still may get some frayed edges, that's my story and I'm sticking too it: ) 

Of course, with all this progress I had to go start something new...  A friend is commisioning a quilt and this was along the lines of what I think she'd like.  I'd done something similar a few years ago and dug in to my stash for almost all the fabrics.  I don't usually work with batiks but they give it the watercolor effect I wanted.  It's a mix of traditional 9 patches mixed in with some of Oh, Fransson's crazy 9 patch blocks.  Hopefully my piecing is precise enough that you can tell where it's deliberately wonky. 

I still had to do some of that trimming I was trying to avoid;-)

Stash Attack

I've been thinking about this one for a while.  I'd picked up some Martinique chenille and had a charm pack and a lot of scraps leftover from when I made made my ruffle quilt.  I wanted a simple design for this, something with big blocks to highlight the chenille and simple piecing because I was worried about working with the chenille.  It didn't stretch like I expected but the ridges push the seams around so it is a bit challenging.  It also makes lots of lint and my studio is now covered in coral fuzz. 

I was determined not to buy any more fabric for this so I also pieced the back with what I had leftover.  It was really close!  In a perfect world I would have aligned the pieced row with the front but this is how it had to be.  Just some simple straight-line quilting on the pieced squares to hold it all together.  The binding is on and tacking it down will be the perfect project for driving to Maine this weekend.  There's nothing like a 3 hour car ride to get some handwork done;-)