Friday Night Project

Good afternoon :)

A few weeks ago, I snagged a HUGE bag of fabric from ThriftMart for $1.00 (originally $6, but I had a $5 coupon- yay me). When I took all the fabric out, I was so surprised at the amount that was in there. It was packed super tight ^.^ In addition to the fabric, there were quite a few handkerchiefs, cloth napkins, pieces of felt, & fabric place mats.

The majority of the fabric.

Anywho, I decided that after Amber's wedding I was going to try my hand at making a real patchwork quilt that is actually adult sized. (My last quilting project was tiny & is here.) My original idea for this quilt was to cut up all the fabric into 1'x1' blocks & arrange them in some kind of color-wise gradient pattern... I'm VERY glad I didn't do that. Why? Because once I cut up the red fabrics & laid them out I had just enough for a 5'x7' quilt... I spent something like 6 hours cutting & piecing together scraps to make full blocks last night.

This little guy was my left hand last night, lol.

I was determined not to waste a lot of fabric, so whenever I needed a few more inches on a block, I surged little pieces together.  Some of my blocks are actually made of 4 or more smaller scraps. I figure it's a scrap quilt so I might as well make use of ALL my scraps :)

As the night went on, and all my blocks were laid out, my trusty "crafting partners" came out to do their comfort tests...

Kiva & Toot

Evidently it passed their test, because they kept creeping back over to lay on it whenever I wasn't looking, chuckle...  Now that the layout was done, I started sewing them together.

**Wedding nails still hanging in there ^.^**

Strips all done.

By this time it was almost midnight & I definitely got in that mode where you're super tired, but you don't want to stop because the end is in sight. I almost gave up, lol...

Catnap time...

Okay! With the help of a marathon of "Storage Wars" I finished sewing together the quilt top. (That show is more interesting than I thought it was going to be.) I got Lamar to hold the top up for a photo. 

The finished quilt top.

You can see all the blocks that I pieced from scraps.  The extra seam lines make me think of Piet Mondrain.  I like that.  It came out really nice. Now I need to decide on a quilting pattern. I'm strongly considering hand-quilting it... mainly because I can't find a place to go & machine stitch it.  I don't want to send it off to someone to do it for me.

The next step is to get the batting & backing fabric & pin it all together.  I figure that that will be my crafternoon project for tomorrow. I'm nervous about the binding step, because my last 2 quilt bindings were a little shifty & fudged. So hopefully 3's a charm.

This post has gotten really long (sorry) but I hope you enjoyed seeing how I sewed my Friday night away.  Have a great weekend!