Finishing Fall: Baby Swoon

This was probably the easiest of all the projects I decided to focus on this fall - the top has sat, mostly finished, for months. I only needed to add the last two borders - I calculated the overall square inches, and this top was 93% finished before this week. Sashing and borders might be the most tedious part of hand-piecing, though I finished these so quickly, relatively speaking, that I think maybe it's more looking at the long seam and anticipating it being tedious than the actual sewing.

The pattern is Camille Roskelley's famous Swoon, obtained via her Pre-cut Piecing Made Simple Craftsy class. The original pattern uses nine blocks; the four here make it throw-sized. The fabric is from the "girl" palette of the Celebration line from Bunny Hill Designs, with a couple of corresponding Bella solids, and the background is my go-to, Kona Snow. I started the quilt as a baby gift for a family friend, and now that the top's finished, I might actually have a completed quilt before the intended recipient turns three.

Not-So-Finishing Fall

So...as much as I try to be all "100% Focus! More Finishing Fall!" there are a few distractions that have crept in here and there. (Who, me? Add more to my WIP list? Never!)

A few weeks ago, I had an Amazon order with an "add-on" item that needed a partner to get over the shipping minimum, so I finally bought a quilting book I've had my eye on, Jen Kingwell's Quilt Lovely.

I love Kingwell's scrappy aesthetic, and several of her designs are on my quilting bucket list. I love them so much that I kind of couldn't stop myself from starting in on one from this book, the Glitter quilt.

I love the idea of a pattern with tall, skinny blocks instead of the standard squares. I also love the push to combine interesting colors and patterns, as I think I can be a bit formalist. (This should ostensibly drive one to endeavor to use up more fabrics from one's stash rather than indulge an impulse to purchase, but...we all know how that goes.) It's a pretty easy block to cut - the squares and the edge triangles are easily rotary cut, and while the other pieces are kind of wonky shapes, they're all quadrilaterals, so it's not too hard to cut them from rectangles. With a little finagling, they can all actually be cut from charm squares, which opens up stash-busting possibilities. The only pain is that you have to add the seam allowances to the templates included in the book - if you look at the picture above, the papers sticking out of the side of the book are the copies I made to trace the templates with their seam allowances onto the template plastic.

My other impulse purchase is also fueling a drive to embrace colors and patterns - the Tula Pink coloring book.

I've often admired Tula Pink fabrics from afar, without quite knowing how the dynamic prints and bright colors would fit in with the rest of my stash. Only recently, I've started to add some here and there . You can see one in the Glitter blocks - when Southern Fabric had their insane, site-crashing 30%-off sale a few weeks ago, I grabbed an Elizabeth scrap bag. (How could I not? We have the same name!) I love that the coloring book allows you to indulge in designs from some of Tula's older lines, without diving into the crazy, price-gouging black market of online Tula sales from any line Salt Water or earlier. My first choice of coloring project - dragonflies from Flutterby.

I love that fabric designers are getting into the coloring book game - it may be a fad, but it really is soothing, and gets my brain thinking in new color combinations.

Finishing Fall: Austen Family Album

Fall Finish No. 2 is more like half-finish, half-WIP - it's a big project, with multiple stages of "finishing." It comes from a block-of-the-week that started eighteen months ago, and finished ten months ago - Barbara Brackman's Austen Family Album. I love a sampler - I can spend hours poring over my favorite block book for inspiration, which also means that I love a sampler where someone else has hunkered down and already chosen the designs and laid out a cutting and piecing plan. I decided to use all fabrics from Bonnie and Camille's Moda lines, plus some corresponding Bella solids, for all of the blocks. These are the final two blocks I've finished out of the thirty-six in the BOW - not number thirty-five and thirty-six posted, just the last two that I stalled out on finishing.

So what took so long? As I said in my first post about the Nana McIntyre design, I went through a period of HST exhaustion, and just looking at the Lady of the Lake block was a major culprit. I also spent a disproportionate amount of time dithering over my fabric choices. Over the course of the project, I cut into a lot of fat quarters and half-yards from my Bonnie and Camille stash - now I have a basket full of strips and scraps ranging from 1-7/8" to 7-1/4", so in addition to the various other projects I have in the pipeline that use B & C fabrics (one more in Finishing Fall, four more on the broader WIP list), they'll be showing up in scrappy projects from here to eternity. (There are more blocks from this BOW on my Instagram.) Did I want to try to figure out what I wanted from the fabrics I'd already cut, or cut something new? In the end, I ended up with a combination of the two, including using a bit more Daysail than I originally thought I would (back when I thought I'd finish before it was widely available, ha!)

These last two finishes are the Ladies Wreath up top, and the Lady of the Lake here. I like the cool palette I ultimately chose for the Ladies Wreath - I think reds and pinks are such a distinctive theme in the Bonnie and Camille family of collections, so I liked trying to mix that up. I also like that it ended up with a lot of Happy-Go-Lucky, since that's the line that first dragged me down into designer obsession. And I think the Lady of the Lake will look striking on point (as it will be in the setting) - it drove me crazy, but I'd love to see someone else do a full quilt with that block.

I plan to use the Netherfield setting Brackman provided, which means whenever it's done, this quilt will be a monster. I have the navy and coral dots from Miss Kate ready to go.

I think the cutting will be the difficult part - really, I just need to set aside like, a day, set up a banquet table with a cutting mat at the end, and tackle all of my big cuts of fabric that need to be cut down for backgrounds, settings, and sashings. Most of the setting should be time consuming, if not too challenging. My only worry is that I've realized that once I get over about a 6"-finished HST, I have a tendency to let my seam sort of bow in around the center, leaving an undersized finished square. (The corner HSTs in this block finished at 8", and I had to re-sew all of them, one more than once.) I worried a bit about finding a good backing for something that would ultimately finish at 104", so I was gratified when Bonnie and Camille announced that their next line will include a 108" backing fabric. Maybe the binding will come from Vintage Picnic, too. (At this rate, it'll probably be whatever line comes after that.)

The next finish won't take so long!