The "sorry I crashed your motorcycle" quilt

I had every intention of returning to blogging full force in 2015, and then life intervened. Seems to happen that way. On the third day of the new year, I got a call at 3am that my boyfriend had been in an accident and was being flown to the nearest trauma hospital. Excuse me, say what?!? Naturally, I jumped in the car and got my ass up to North Myrtle Beach (an hour away). All in all, for the nature of the accident, he was fine. A couple facial fractures and some road rash. He had crashed a friend's motorcycle. It could have been so much worse. So in the days following, we both agreed that his friend (who constantly harassed me about how he could get a quilt) probably deserved a quilt. I quickly got to work.

I generally do not make quilts in man colors, like ever. But these guys are firefighters, and I just don't think AMH was going to fly. I used Doe as my springboard, as it had just arrived, and happened to be incredibly gender neutral. Here is the resulting quilt!

I love it. Like bleeping love it. I honestly thought it was going to be incredibly hard to sew because the colors are so foreign to me.

What was hard was gifting it. I didn't expect parting with it to be such a challenge. The pattern is Bonnie Hunter's free Scrappy Trip. If you recall, it was crazy popular about two years ago. It goes together surprisingly fast. I backed it in Cotton and Steel Netorious in Teal. Something about the cotton used for the Cotton and Steel fabrics is luxuriously soft when washed. You can't help but snuggle with it.

I quilted it following the diagonals in the blocks, much like my first Scrappy Trip. It is bound using a gorgeous blue from Doe called Trellis. It had juuuuuust arrived in the mail. If I had had anything else that looked nearly as good as a binding, I would have hoarded it with all the others due to my current Doe love affair.

So today, I said goodbye. She is with her new owner, who I think loves her very much. I have only ever gifted quilts to my family, knowing I would see them many more times.

Parting with this one was oddly emotional. Not in a crying sort of way, but in a tugged at my heart sort of way. However, if I keep too many more quilts, Adham may start peddling them behind my back. We are sort of at max quilt capacity over here.

So here's to kicking off 2015 on a unique foot. I am almost nervous to see what else it has in store for us!

Thinning out the WIPs

Life is officially back to normal. My project in Columbia is over, and I am once more actually living in the place where I pay rent. What a concept. I've made a point to try to get some of the WIPs I have lying around actually complete and usable. I am happy to announce that I have made some progress!

The #scrappytripalong got quilted and bound (finished pictures to come after binding)

and o, do you remember the Single Girl? The bane of my existence? Haha, not really. I made it during the Single Girl Quilt Along (well started it). Then I took a break and actually finished it like 6 months later. Since then, it has been sitting in a closet (something like 18 months to 2 years) ignored, largely due to my fear of quilting it. With my new found confidence in quilting, I decided to tackle it today.

Turns out it is really heavy. That aside, I got it done and I am super proud. I don't want to spoil the final product, so I will have pictures up as soon as the binding is on!

And next, the Good Folks quilt. Basted and ready for a turn on the machine. I'm actually hesitant on this one because I have no idea what to put on it. Hmmm. I also still lack binding. I really really want to bind it in the blue fortune or the black buttoned up, however those are very hard to come by. I may just continue to troll etsy and see if anything good comes along.

And what else to do on your first saturday back home but organize scraps?! I have always had them sorted by color, but never by size. A lot of my projects for curves class (which obviously I am ridiculously behind on) use scraps, so I am excited to have them organized and ready for when I dive in!

Now back to enjoying my home sweet home!

#scrappytripalong Almost there

Quilt top pieced and quilt basted, I am in the home stretch on this one. When my shift ended on Wednesday, I took a little break on this quilt to finally start on my Weekender bag. Let me tell you, this bag is not for the meek. It has been incredibly time consuming, but I am almost done and ready to show off! It is rather hard, and thus I'm feeling pretty accomplished. Haha. But back to the quilt at hand.

I have to go back to Columbia today for my final shift on this project and wanted to get the Scrappy Trip Along quilt basted so that I could quilt it while in my hotel room. Basting usually goes pretty smoothly for me, but this one started out as a nightmare. The garage is full of sawdust from the chicken coop that my dad is building, and it was too windy to try to do it on the driveway. The only place left, was inside.

This is not the best idea due to the spray radius of the glue, but it was the only option. For whatever reason, no matter what my Mom and I did, we could not get the backing to lay on the batting smoothly without wrinkles. I can normally get it to lay pretty flat and even and then smooth any remaining wrinkles with my hands, but not this time. Right before I went into full meltdown mode, we called in Dad.

Naturally, Dad knew just what to do. He essentially just wallpapered the whole thing down. I know all of this is just like duh, but I normally can smooth the wrinkles out with my hands after laying down each layer. This however, gave such perfect results (I mean PERFECT, check out that backing) that I recommend it to all home quilt basters.

Here's what we did. The batting was taped to the floor to apply the backing and quilt top to the batting. It makes for easier smoothing when you have the fabric side up rather than batting side up. I like to bast half of the quilt at a time (shown below) so that you have less sticky area to control at once. So, spray basting onto batting. 

The next part is easier if you have three participants. I couldn't get any great pictures while we were mid process since I was one of the three people involved, but hopefully you get the idea. Next week I will be basting the Good Folks quilt and I will see if I can rope someone in to photograph. 

While one person smoothes, have two others hold each corner of the quilt and keep it hovered over the sticky batting. While you are smoothing from the middle towards the end of the quilt, have them slowly lay it down ahead of you. This allows controlled application of the quilt back or top to the batting that is firmly secured, and it allows any wrinkles that may appear to be smoothed out before the entire area of the quilt is set. 

End result, absolutely no wrinkles. Not even the 'i can live with those' wrinkles. I'm sure many people are like yea, obviously, BUT this opened a whole new world to me for perfectly basted quilts. Ill put up an in depth picture tutorial when we baste the Good Folks quilt!

#scrappytripalong Almost pieced!

I finally finished piecing all 30 of my blocks for the #scrappytripalong quilt. I got a little distracted between being in the middle of another 10 day shift and having my boyfriend here to visit for a few days. It was nice to come home (to my hotel room?...thats not home) and unwind with him around.

Since I have so much floor space and the carpet in my room is so lovely (scary?) I decided to play with a couple different layouts. There is the basic traditional,

the zig zag,

and the offset diamond.

After much deliberation and TONS of feedback from my wonderful instagram friends, I ended up deciding on going the traditional route. It is just so pretty. I do, however, plan to do another one in boy colors and use the zig zag pattern.

With that decision made, I rearranged the blocks to try to get the best distribution of lights and darks. Decent right? Ok, now to piece the top. This is the first quilt that I think I might actually start and finish in the same month. Holy moly! #finishit2013