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!