Blogger's Quilt Festival - Scrappy entry

It's Blogger's Quilt Festival time again, and this time it didn't slip past while I was otherwise preoccupied! Thank you Amy for organising and hosting again.  If you are new to my blog, coming over from the Festival post,  welcome!  I hope you stay and visit a while.

Without further ado, here is my entry in the Scrap Quilt category.  If you've been reading my blog, you've seen it before and I hope you don't mind a repeat viewing.  It's one of my favourites from the past year.

Lucky Bugger quilt, 50"x 60"

Lucky Bugger (so called because that was what the doctor called dad) measures 50" x 66" and came mostly from my scrap bins.  I had to raid the quilt shop for the dark blue background/border fabric.  The design is mine, based on traditional blocks. 
 

It's basically a traditional Ocean Waves quilt, with a little careful color placement tossed in to get the stars. 

The sailboat was cut out of a piece that I pieced from scrap strips.

This quilt was entirely quilted with my walking foot.  Have I mentioned I love my walking foot?

I'm off to view all the other eye candy in the Blogger's Quilt Festival!

Now I can share

Now that dad has received his quilt, I can share it here.  You've seen peeks of it in progress, but I really thought he should be the first to see the finished quilt!

This quilt was designed just for dad, who loves to sail.  The applique sailboat was a bit of a stretch for me, as I haven't done much applique and I had to draw the shape myself too.  However, I really wanted a sailboat, and I really wanted the Ocean Waves blocks.  I couldn't figure out a better way to make the two work together so I took the plunge and there it is.  I'm quite pleased with the result!

It was really fun to play with color in the ocean waves.  I hadn't planned to add the stars.  I just wanted to dig into my blue scraps.  However, after coloring in my sketch, I thought it looked a little bland.  Looking at how the triangles met at block corners, I saw a star shape so decided to play with that idea.

I quilted this entirely with a walking foot.  I really did not want the quilting to compete with all those blues so I just quilted in the ditch in the "waves"  (but not around every triangle!).  My daughter helped me pick out the stencil for the border quilting.  My husband helped talk me out of talking myself out of quilting that border design after I marked it.  It looks much better and fits in much better with the whole look when quilted in matching thread than it did when marked in white pencil!

We went out to a local park on the way to the post office to mail the quilt.  There's a lake off to the left of the photo.  It was windy.  I was nervous.  Hubby assured me he had a good grip on the quilt!

He did!  

And just because you know I love quilt with feet:

I particularly like this one.  If you knew my husband, you'd think he was the least likely person to have bright orange shoelaces!

Progress

I'm still plugging away at those Ocean Waves blocks.  Only twelve more to go! I'm still making them one block at a time so I can plan my pressing to make things nest to help me match seams, but I have a good routine so each block is getting made faster than the previous one.

This is not progressing as quickly as I had hoped, but once I had this idea in mind nothing else would do. The only thing to do is keep at it!  It will be worth it in the end.

I was very good and did not let this squirrel in the house in the meantime:

I had these all picked out for a sample to showcase the Quick Curves Ruler at the shop where I work, but then we decided several runners showcasing different blocks would be better.  There were all those gorgeous spring greens and that little splash of orange and those Modern Backgrounds, all loaded on the cart with nowhere to go.  So sad!

This is not on my "to do" list.  Nope.  Just checked the list again.  Not there.  This is definitely a distraction (known as a squirrel in this house, as a squirrel can distract the dog from just about anything).  But these colors, used in Chic Country, would be perfect for my daughter.  I would even use the QCR ruler she gave me for Christmas....  There is now a nice little "Quilt in Progress" beanbag sitting on these fabrics at the shop so they won't get reshelved until I cut off what I need, but the fabrics are not actually in the house yet. 

First, the blue one.  Gotta go sew so I can finish the blue quilt then let the squirrel in!

What was I thinking?

155 blue HST

What was I thinking?  The design looks great on paper, but 350, 2" finished HST squares now seems like a bit much!.    I made 310 of them 18 at a time using a "sew on the marked lines and cut apart" triangle paper method, so that went pretty quickly.  It gave me 18 of each color combination, but spread over 310 I figured it would still look scrappy.  I made the other 40 two at a time because I wanted variety in the colors and color combos.

They are all ready but now I need to sew them all together and that's where things are slowing down!  First, random is hard.  To ensure I spread the 18 duplicates of each HST square more or less randomly around the quilt, I divided the 350 into piles of 10 for my 35 blocks.  I thought I would chain sew...but then I lose track of what belongs in which block.  I might just give up on keeping track when I get to the blocks that only have blue units and start chain sewing with abandon.  Right now I'm sewing one block at a time to make sure the colors are positioned properly, so it's slow going.

Piles of units waiting their turns

I have 4 blocks done so far.  I'm grinding my teeth a little because I measure at each step, and everything is perfect until I add those large corner triangles.  At that point the block seems to miraculously (and frustratingly!) shrink by about 1/8" in one direction.  Now I'm trying to starch everything stiff and see if that helps.

At least I can see something pretty start to take shape as I grind my teeth!