Hurry Up and Wait!

Happy New Years Everyone!

Well I did something New Years Day that I've wanted to do for years but kept forgetting to do!

Every year Planet Patchwork hosts a new years day mystery quilt and I've been wanting to do it for years now - but, somehow I would usually forget.  Well, this New years morning I woke up, and, since I "like" Planet Patchwork on Facebook the start of the mystery quilt came up on my Facebook feed.  I thought that it was an omen or something like that and I immediately started hunting through my stash to find the fabrics for the yardage requirements.  

Since one of my New Years resolutions is to use my stash as much as possible, I dug into my Asian prints bin and found the 23 fabrics required and set to work! I made my choices quickly since I was already a bit behind in the pre-cutting - I just went with my gut and initial impressions.  

I followed along with the clues and worked for most of the day and voila!  I had a finished quilt top!  It was really fun to follow along with the other quilters on The Planet Patchwork facebook page.  I also LOVE that this quilt is completely from my stash using up some fabrics I bought for the stash and also some scraps - it's a mix of collections and designers but I think that it all works well.

 

I pulled the orange Asian print from my stash - it was on the 50% off table and I couldn't resist!  It has sat in my stash for about 6 years so it's time to use about 4 meters of it for the back I think ;-)

 

Next, I pulled out my scrappy chimneys and corner-stones quilt and got to work on a piano key border.  Once again I used my 1.5" Accuquilt Go! strip die and cut all the strips for the border from scraps and from some random green and blue fat quarters in my stash.  At first I thought that the final border was too wide for the quilt; but, once I got all 4 borders on the quilt I started to really like the impact!  And, once I laid the top out over our bed, I really liked the way that the piano-keyfell over the edges of the bed.  The wide border is staying ;-)

One thing I did, before adding these borders to the quilt, is sew along the edges at about 1/8" in so that they don't stretch out or warp when the quilt is one the frame.  This only took a few minutes but I think I'm going to be really happy I did this while I'm quilting it.  

If you can believe it I also have a navy backing fabric in my stash that I am going to use for the back of this quilt too!  It was also on the 50% off table so I snapped it up and there it sat - well, it will work perfectly for the back of this quilt.  So far so good with keeping my resolution!

So, why haven't I loaded either one of these quilt tops onto my frame to start quilting?  Well, in a couple days my LQS is having a sale and I think that batting will be 25% off; so, since I will need about 6 or 7 meters of batting for both quilts, I'm going to wait a bit and save a few $$$!  Oh well, I can use that time to actually decide how I'm going to quilt them!

So - did anyone make and quilty resolutions?