Inventory quilt top nearing the finish line

I had a few moments of doubt about the stars for my Sparkling Inventory.  I pulled out various creams and golds, thinking I could inventory those in the stars, but they really didn't pop on the scrappy blue background.  I didn't take a picture, and those fabrics are are all tucked away in their bin again, so you'll have to take my word for it.

White popped on the blue, but I never built up my collection of white on white fabrics after I decimated it to make Milky Way.  The same white in all the triangles was very bland.  Ah ha!  How about that white Quiter's Linen "Blanc" by Robert Kaufman, the white with silver metallic texture?  That's not plain, and maybe the silver bits would add interest.  Never mind that what I had available was specifically earmarked for something else.  :)

Yes, I think that worked.

I liked the way that looked in the stars, but 10 of the same stars all in a row lacked spark, so I cast about for a second star fabric.  I found this grey with silver accents in a bin with snowflake prints.  I vaguely recall buying them all for a very specific idea that I fell out of love with, but clearly I never got around to re-homing the fabrics to their appropriate color bins when the original plan fell apart. Indirectly, this bright blue inventory quilt is making me take stock of what else I have!

Piecing went mostly smoothly.  I had a few bad moments one evening after piecing a bunch of the white and grey triangles.  Fun fact, the two shapes below are not interchangeable.

I knew this, yet after the first two I proceeded to sew the remaining 18 units in the wrong orientation.  That's what happens when I sew past my bedtime!

It didn't take long to rip and resew the next morning, and the rest of the assembly went smoothly.  Next, I need to decide what to do with borders.  The pattern calls for scrappy, but as I flipped the scrappy and non-scrappy parts in this quilt, I think I might do the same in the borders and choose a single fabric.

Sparkling Inventory progress

The bright blue inventory is progressing.  After selecting all the brightest blue fabrics in my stash (49 different ones, if you're interested) I was pleased to find that I could arrange them in more or less gradated order on either side of the star path.  I then cut each down to size according to where it would end up in the pattern.

The background is made up of strips.  As written, the pattern calls for some strips to be twice as wide as the rest.  To include a larger selection of fabrics, I made the wider strips from two different fabrics, sewing two narrower strips together to make up the wider width.

This particular version of Sparkling Trail is a scaled down one using 2 1/2" and 4 1/2" strips. If I had made the original throw size as described in the pattern I could have used 4 1/2" strips for the narrow strips, and sewn two of those together for the wider 8 1/2"strips.  I also could have used jelly roll strips (2 1/2" wide) to build up the 4 1/2" and 8 1/2" strips:  2  strips sewn together yield a 4 1/2" strips, 4 strips would yield the 8 1/2" strip.

If you would like to make the scaled down version of the pattern, you can download instructions to convert the pattern. Please note that these instructions are only for the adjusted fabric amounts and cutting sizes.  They do not include the assembly instructions or assembly diagrams.

Scaled down version of Sparkling Trail

The throw size pattern is available in my Etsy shop.  Use the coupon code JWQIQ2020 for 20% off this pattern now through June 30th, 2020.

Inventory project fabric pull

While I was still working out what direction to take for my inventory quilt, I sorted through my stack of quilts for a trunk show.  With Inventory Quilts on the brain, this one particularly caught my eye.

Milky Way has samples of most of the bright blues I had in my scrap bins in 2018.  You can see in the progress picture below that the background is also scrappy, using up most of the white on white fabrics I owned. 

I suppose it is actually a record of my past inventory of white on white, because I have none of those left after making this quilt.

Milky Way is also an example of mixing up the color placement from what is suggested in the pattern.  It uses all the cutting numbers and sizes, and the assembly instructions from my pattern Magnitudes, but throws all the color into the stars instead of in the block backgrounds, and matches the sashing to the block background to make it disappear.

How does this relate to my inventory project?  I decided to flip the color placement.  Where there is a single background color in the Sparkling Trail pattern, I am going to build the inventory quilt version's background from multiple fabrics.  The stars are going to use neutrals this time around.

Also, I'm using blues! My bin of blues is still larger than all the other colours' bins, so it seems a good one to inventory.

This does not represent the entire fabric selection in the blue bin.  When I started sifting through the collection, I realized two things.  First, I have way too many blues to shoehorn into this project.  Second, not all blues play well side by side.  I know, it's shocking!  There are bright blues and grey-blues and turquoisy blues that look blue when you put them with turquoise and turquoise when you put them with blues and... Well. You get the idea.

In the end I decided to narrow the inventory focus even more and just use the brightest blues.  I like how it's turning out.  Of course, it's blue.  How could I go wrong?