Sneaking past the finish line

This top has sneaked its way to a finish without much by way of a progress record, I'm afraid.  I lost heart trying to take pictures in a tiny space - most of them showed too much of the surrounding mess and the piecing itself got lost in the mix.  However, it is a completed top, which is the point of things after all, so I'm not beating myself up too much. 

Here are the couple of progress shots I managed.

It turned out to be somewhere between a log cabin and a medallion, in terms of the construction.  Seems to be a spot I'm quite comfortable sitting in.  There were lots of things I wanted as I was piecing, but this was definitely one of those quilts with its own ideas.  So, I wanted more of the green and tried adding green triangles into hourglass blocks and as flying geese, neither of which was any good.  I wanted to use tumbler blocks again, but the quilt wanted those hourglasses.  As usual, the quilt was right.

My favourite bit of the whole thing turns out to be the plaid which has worked well both in strips but also mixed into the hourglasses and as inserts in longer strips.  I think it helps to keep everything coherent but also to move the eye around nicely.

This is the second orange quilt I've made recently.  I am currently collecting shirts for a green project for AHIQ but I'm not sure I've got quite enough yet.  If not, I will have to come up with something else for the time being, so I'm off to dig around in my shirt stash and see what I can find.  

 

Time spent quilting is never wasted

And just to prove it, while my house was in chaos I did at least manage to quilt my way to the first finish of the year.  This top was only made last year and in the normal course of things would be nowhere near the front of the queue.  However, just before the builders came I made a few backs as a precaution.  Of course making more than one was an act of pure optimism but I was on a roll.  Then I tucked them all ways in a drawer, rolled up with their respective tops, thinking they would be easy to grab as and when I needed them.  This was the first one my hand lit on, so it is the one that made it into the hoop.

What to say about it?  Well, it's the first quilt I've ever made entirely from shirts.  This wasn't a deliberate policy and I think there were pieces of quilting cotton in my initial pull, but none of them quite worked in the end, so it was shirts all the way.  

I haven't done it for a while, but I used quite a lot of button plackets 

just because it felt like this was a quilt that could take it without descending into tweeness.  I also used most of the fabrics used to line the yokes, which is often different from but complementary to the main body of the shirt.  

The picture bottom right shows a lovely shirt, with a slight sheen.  I used the front and the back of the fabric, pretty much without thinking about which way it landed in any given moment.

I had enough fabric to keep going (final size is about 67" square-ish) but it seemed to be done so I stopped.  Pleasingly, this meant I had enough left to do the back too.

This was started on 27th May 2021.  Piecing was finished on 1st July.  I put it in the hoop during the first week in January 2022 and it was finished on 15th March.  The wadding is organic cotton, the threads were what I had, but all perle cotton and mostly no.8.  The binding is this lovely wobbly stripe from very old stash.  I think maybe it's a Janet Clare fabric?

One of the nice things about shirt quilts is that people seem more comfortable with them - they already feel not-quite-new,  I suppose.  Either that, or my guys have become so used to piles of quilts that they just don't stand on ceremony any more.  Either way, within a day of finishing it, I came in to find it had already been put to use and then left, draped rather fetchingly, across a chair.  Hooray.