A Million Little Pieces (Scrappy Kaffe Fassett)

Welcome to the Fall 2014 Bloggers Quilt Festival. I do enjoy spending the wee hours of the morning winding down and blog hopping to see everyone's entries in the Festival--so many beautiful quilts, and so much talent to be wowed by.  Major thanks to Amy Ellis for coordinating this quilt fest. It's a lot of work, and we all appreciate her efforts, as well as the generosity of all that provide the prizes for the winners. (Cheers and applause).

Here's my entry in the Scrappy quilt category. I hope you enjoy it.

I call this quilt 'A Million Little Pieces'.

 

I could call it worse having cut and pieced all those little scraps, but since I was entering it in the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair, it's name needed to be suitable for General Audiences.
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To my surprise, it finished in 5th place. Had I named it 'A Million Little Perfectly Aligned Pieces  Meticulously Quilted on a Regular Size Home Machine with 1200 Yards of Thread With Added Flange' it might have fared better. (Next time.)

 

This quilt began in a workshop with Joan Ford (of Scrap Therapy fame). The pattern is 'Bloomin' Steps' from her book 'Cut the Scraps'. The quilt measures 75x87 and is made using Kaffe Fassett scraps from my stash (aka 'hoard') of Kaffe that I've been collecting since I began quilting 6 years ago. The contrast is Kona Bleach White, and it's been pieced and quilted with my all-time favorite Aurifil thread....white....50 wt for piecing/60 wt in the bobbin and 40 wt for quilting/50 wt in the bobbin.

Once it was together it hung in the studio for quite a while before I could muster the energy to begin quilting this on my trusty Bernina 440.

 

This has been the largest quilt I've had to wrangle, and let me tell you that not a quilting session went by where I didn't think  "Note to self: Don't forget to buy a lottery ticket...I really need a longarm".

Aside from all of those nicely aligned, crisp points, I'm most proud that of those 1000 1-1/2" squares in the border, no two alike are side by side. (A testament to my undiagnosed OCD)

It hasn't really been used yet, not sure I want to wash it before hanging it in our Guild quilt show this Spring.It came back from the Fair with a couple of black marks on it (literally) .....hopefully they'll wash out.

I hope you enjoyed my Festival entry and that you'll check back often and follow along as I try to finish Jingle (pictured below) in time for the holidays--2 years after starting it.  It's just about ready for wrangling (and it's a 'tad' bigger than Pieces). Can't wait. Fun times. (double not)

Note to self:  pick up a Mega Millions ticket next time you're out.

Enjoy the Festival!

It's Been A Busy Month, But I'm Back on Track (Almost)

 There's been a flurry of activity in the studio for the past month or so.....

First off, I finished the quilt top for the Aiming for Accuracy quilt along. It's 95% Kaffe Fassett prints, stitched together with a 50 wt. Aurifil gray thread (switched to black on those filmstrip borders). As you know, it already has a home...it's going to my SIL's beachhouse when it's done. She's already chosen a fabric for the back from my Kaffe stash, but I think I'm going to shake things up a bit when I get around to it.

While working on this, I couldn't resist starting another project in my down time waiting for the next block to upload....

You remember 'Lemon Pepper', right? Well, the top is pieced, and there were 34 blocks left over (I was going to make pillows but decided against it).  So I laid them out on the design wall a few different ways and came up with a pattern of blocks to be pieced with solid gray...

creating a reversible throw. This one's for Jenifer. I hope to finish it for Christmas, so it's in the queue ahead of the A4A (above).

By now you know that 2 projects at a time is simply not challenging enough for me, so I added a third.....

This is just the center of it (I've sewn together the top; two rows so far). If you think that's a lot of 2" squares, wait until you see the border....it's got about a thousand of them in it. I'll be constructing it using a fusible grid, so I'll be sure to show you how that's done once I get to it. There's still an inner border of 4-patch diamonds that goes around this. I'm stitching this one with a 50 wt white Aurifil. I'll probably quilt it with a 40 wt white, though I may have an appropriate variegated 28 wt in the thread cabinet.

Call me crazy, but I had all these scraps of Kaffe Fassett left over from the A4A quilt, in addition to my hoard stash of uncut Kaffe. Well, my Guild just happened to have a workshop scheduled with Joan Ford of scraptherapy fame, so I signed on at the last minute. In the end, it cost me a ton of money to make this quilt (I bought a lot of neat stuff at the workshop that I'll show in another post), but I really love it. It's going to be a perfect summer quilt, and this one is staying here :)

Check back tomorrow for a little demo of some neat tools and accessories that you may not know about. I'm off to enjoy a cocktail before I start prepping some applique blocks to work on during our upcoming trip to Florida....could be another quilt in there before the end of the year!