High Hopes

An article by Rachel    Comments Off

It seems like I start every weekend with high hopes that I’ll have a ton of time to sew and create a master piece. In reality, the realities of life (you know grocery shopping, church responsibilities, yard work, etc.) usually end up taking a larger portion of my time than I care to admit.

Well this weekend I was kind of lucky. It took less time than I planned to clean up the leaves in the back yard, grocery shopping wasn’t too painful, and I had a moment to sew.

A couple of weekends ago, I decided to make something fall like. My intention was to create a table runner, but I changed my plans half way through the project. I’ve been inspired by quilts made from rectangles of various length stacked randomly. Does that make sense? Well just look at my pictures below to see what I’m talking out.

I started by cutting (42) 1.5″ strips of fabric. To keep with the fall theme, I choose red, yellow, and orange. I threw in a bit of brown for good measure. I trimmed the strips in lengthens ranging from 6″ to 12″. Then I sewed on white strips to get each strip to about 22-23″ long. From here, I played with the strips until I was happy with the design.

This is when I changed my mind about this quilt. Instead of being a table runner, it needed to be a wall hanging. It looks so much better hung vertically. I’ll show you when I finish the quilt. Back to my process…

When I had the strips sewed into blocks of eight, I trimmed them down to 18″. Then I sewed the blocks together. Here’s the final layout. This the about-to-be-based picture.

The quilted is actually quilted and the binding is attached. Now I just need to sew it hand sew it down. I would stop to take pictures, but it would probably mean this blog post wouldn’t happen. Just know that I’m motivated to finish it in the next couple of days. I’d like to have a finished project at my next quilt guild meeting. So you’ll probably see a finished picture soon.