Design dilemma

I fell in love with this design from Kim Brackett's "Scrap Basket Sensations":

 and remembered that I had yardage of a brown monoprint and scraps from the "Buttercup" and "Fresh Cottons" collections from previous projects.  During the first week of the Orca Bay mystery, I made 16 blocks for the center of the quilt and through the weeks added 20 more for a 6 x 6 layout.  Then I ran out of fabric.  I wanted it larger so I bought a jelly roll of "Buttercup" on sale online and made 28 more blocks to finish the designed size:

Here it is with the blocks laid out in order.  Before I start joining the rows I wanted to decide if there was something else I could do to make the quilt larger.  I have more 2 1/2" x 4 1/2" scraps of the colors and plenty of the brown, so I'm thinking about adding a 2" brown border and then a 4" picket-style multicolor border with the brown triangles added to the outer tips to make the pickets.  Perhaps then finish it up with another 2" brown border.  What do you think?

I also thought about a 2" border between the outer and second concentric rows, and made up the difference in the length by adding two 2" brown strips between the 2nd/3rd and 6th/7th blocks, which looked good on paper but not in person.  I scratched that idea.

Or should I let well enough alone?  I would like the quilt to be a little bigger.  My picket border would size it up from 64" square to 80" square.  It would also be a lot of work, making those 128 pickets plus the corner blocks.  I'll have to look at my scraps again and see if I have enough before thinking further

Letting go of match-y match-y

Part 3 of Carolina Christmas is posted and I'm cutting out patches this morning - 192 blue rectangles and 592 (yes!) neutral squares. I may have to supplement my yardage to have enough neutrals, but that's not a problem. There's a lot more that will work with my initial selections. The thing is, I need to loosen up with the blue rectangles.

I had selected 13 blue fabrics, all various intensities of blue/green. I spread them out this morning and realized something.

I may be able to do scrappy but I'm still too hung up on match-y.

Seen all together like that, there wasn't enough difference between the fabrics. In the interest of cohesion, I had lost variety. Interesting.

So I went into my stash and started pulling more blues, this time looking more for coordination than similarity. In doing this, I incorporated more lights and more darks than I had before. I've got half the rectangles cut and stacked together and I'm liking how it looks. The golds and golden tans in the blocks already made are similar in saturation and tone but vary in pattern. The blue is going to give this quilt its spark, so I better start picking spark-y blues. Here's what I came up with:
Oh, and here's the 592 neutral squares (out of 22 different fabrics):Comfort zone here, me over there. It's a start.

Drowning in a storm at sea

There's no reason to ask if you've done this. If you have any UFOs, it's likely this problem has happened to you.

I have a scrappy Storm At Sea that I started an embarrassingly long time ago. I've been in this "finish what you started" mood for a while, and I'm almost done with stockpiled binding jobs. I only have a few small tops awaiting quilting (I hope to do these myself if Santa got me those machine quilting DVDs I asked for). In fact, I'm pretty much caught up and ready for the mystery quilt that starts Friday. That is, except for the UFOs stockpiled on the top shelf of my stash closet. There's about 10 of them. Some of them are UFOs because I bought a kit and never got around to finishing it. Some are half-done and I got bored, bored, bored. Others were too nerve-frazzling for the time I was making them. This Storm At Sea was such a quilt.

I figure it's been marinating up there for about 10 years. Maybe more.

I pulled out all the bagged bunches of fabric. There were the pieces for the 8" square-in-a-square-inside-a-square blocks, the pieces for the diamond sashing, and the 4" square-in-a-square sashing corner blocks. But there were also some 8" square-in-a-square blocks, and some diamond sashing and 4"square-in-a-square corner blocks with the light/dark colors reversed. Wha????

I have no idea how this quilt is assembled.

OK. I knew it was a pattern from a book. Now, which book? Even though I cleaned out my shelves last year, I still have quite a few quilting books. So I pulled up a chair and started thumbing through them. It took a while, but finally I pulled out Marsha McCloskey's wonderful "Quick Classic Quilts" and there it was.

A Storm At Sea quilt with a reversed-colors pieced border. Page 114. It's on the chest at the foot of the bed in this cover picture.

What size is it? 94" x 94".

I guess I know why I burned out on it before. I'll start with the center, and if everything goes well, I'll add the pieced border. Or maybe not.

Latest project

This is a terrible picture, taken on my office floor, and the colors are a little off, but this is my latest piecing completion. It's a pattern from the Better Homes and Gardens Quilt Sampler, Fall/Winter 2008, and it's 42 inches square. It looks rather different that the magazine quilt, even though it's red/white/blue like theirs, because I used a floral in the outer border. I am pleased to note that this is 100% stash - nothing purchased. It also contains some of my 21 year old blue print!

Oh, and I incorporated a peeper! Since many of my quilts are done by a longarmer using a panto pattern, I had never added one of these small piping trims before. It's right there at the outer edge of the thin inner border. It's so small that you barely see it.

I hope my longarmer can quilt all-over stars, because that will perfectly finish this patriotic-colored wall quilt.

OK, I've had some of my fabric stash for a long time...

...but this is ridiculous. This fabric is old enough to drink!

Six for them, one for me

Here's number six for Project Linus. It's quilted in the ditch around the bow ties and the design extends into the border. This is not a big one, just 36" x 42", little baby size, because that's all the block pattern fabric that I had. I wanted to use it up, and this was a quick pattern.

Now, one for me. I was rooting through my stash when I came across some fabric from Thimbleberries, probably from 4 or so years ago. It's printed like small applique squares, 7" and 3.5" finished size. I have 8 large squares and 20 small ones. It was leftover from a baby quilt I made for a co-worker. The complete line had yardage of the print designs used in the blocks, so you could add sashing or a pieced design around them and reinforce the appliqued look. It's in the lovely murky colors that I prefer.

So, I got inspired. I dug out all the matching fabric that I still had, and made up a plan. There will be 35 blocks, 5 x 7, randomly selected, either the large printed block, a solid calico block, or a small printed block with sashing to bring it to 7" square. There will be a 3.5" border, pieced from all the calico scraps with the 3.5" print squares in the corners. The backing is a neutral print from Thimbleberries (because that's the only one I had enough of) and the binding is green print. And that uses up every scrap of the matching fabric! I think it will be darling and be very "me".

Back to Project Linus: I have decided to donate 24 quilts to them this year. I've already finished six, and that leaves 18 over 10 1/2 months, which I think is a do-able. I can get in a sewing fit and turn out 3 or 4 and then take a break, holidays or such. They're all machine quilted and machine bound, and I'm not choosing such hard patterns, so I think it's possible.

This chapter of Project Linus is rather small, and I'm not sure how many quilts she's taking in. The neighboring district is huge and handles 2000+ quilts a year, but I don't think ours did more than 250 last year. So we all need to step up. Part of the problem is that the coordinator just took over the program in the last 18 months and hasn't had the support to build much group focus. I don't think she has meetings now. If all the blanketeers got together occasionally for work or socializing, we could maybe get some momentum going. This is NOT a criticism of the coordinator. She took it over when the last one had to stop, I believe for health reasons, and I respect all the work she does. We contributors need to pitch in more. I think I may suggest a picnic/potluck this summer when it's warmer to start building some comraderie. I hope she would consider hosting it. Her house is close to a nice park, which we could use.

Oh, dear, I'm turning into a "group" person.