A Pleasant Trip

I thoroughly enjoyed my many trips around the world quilt.  You can find out more about the pattern and quilt along in my previous post.  It was a complete pleasure to make this quilt from start to finish.  I was excited to pull scrap strips in my favorite color palette of the moment.  I ended up raiding my stash as well, but it was worth it. I made 25 blocks; the quilt finishes at 60 inches square.  

The colors are moody and wintry, and the rich teals are a new obsession for me.  It is a hard color to find in fabrics.  I want it rich and saturated, without white accents that disrupt the value.  If you have a favorite dark turquoise or teal, let me know!

The Anna Maria Horner pastry voile I chose for the binding is the perfect teal.  And let me tell you, if you have not hand sewn a voile binding, you are missing out!  It was such a pleasure.  I will definitely be using it again.

I decided to try out  a new free motion quilting design.  I thought the busy quilt top would camouflage any imperfections, which thankfully seems to have been the case.  I picked the concentric circles design from Angela's first book.  The design is really quick and easy, although next time I will make the circles on a smaller scale (less than four inches across would be good I think), as the large circles were hard to keep even on my tiny machine.  I really love the texture they create, almost like raindrop ripples in a puddle.

The back is a text print from the Mama Said Sew line.  I saw it on lucyandnorman's gorgeous scrappy trip along quilt and had to have it.

You can find the throw sized quilt in my etsy shop.

Tripping

If you instagram (I'm @teaginny over there), no doubt you've seen many #scrappytripalong blocks popping up.  There is also a flickr group for this informal quilt along.  The tutorial for the block can be found on Quiltville, and it is rather ingenious.  It uses strip sets to create blocks like the ones below.

I started with my scrap bin of 2.5 inch strips and chose any fabrics in plum, teal, aqua, gray, and white.  I've wanted to work with this color scheme for a while, so it's good to finally see them all together.  It feels rich and wintry to me.

When you put the blocks together in this configuration, you get the effect of many trips around the world.  If you keep it scrappy, the "trips" are a little wonky and broken up, which makes it all the more interesting to me. It is really fun to arrange and rearrange them on my design wall.

I have 16 blocks so far with strips for another four.  Perhaps 25 would be a better size.  It's a lot of fun, so I'm not in a rush to finish.

Urban Garden Zigzag

I finished machine quilting and binding this beauty last night. This is a very fat quarter friendly project. One fat quarter does one zigzag row with some leftover. You can see I used leftover bits on the back for a scrappy zigzag. This measures 39" square, so a nice baby quilt.

Finished Zig Zag Top

Here she is all pieced. I'm thinking about piecing a back of all white with one zig zag row across. I'm not very satisfied with my color arrangment in the quilt, but I did really enjoy learning a new technique, making a zig zag quilt for the first time, and working with a very saturated fabric line. Fun!

New Project Revealed

I've joined my first quilt along! This is the first four rows of the zig zag quilt by Park City Girl for the Old Red Barn Co Quilt Along on flickr.
The triangles are definitely a little fiddly, but I've found as long as I pin carefully I'm not loosing any points on my zigs or zags. Fun stuff. If anyone is interested in joining along, Park City Girl's directions are super!

Newest Project

Enjoying working with some fabric from the Urban Garden line.Anyone want to guess what my newest project is?