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Wandering Quilt – Kathy’s Kitschy quilt

Just in case you are not familiar with traveling quilts here is the idea: Each member of your group creates a starter block and usually writes a journal with details, theme and style they would like their quilt to end up. You send your starter block to another member in your group (usually there is a list, and you send it to the next lady on the list), they have a month to add on to your starter block and get your quilt going. Then, they send it to the next woman on the list and so on and so on until your quilt arrives back to you. In the meantime, as your quilt is traveling to each member of your group, their quilts are as well, so you will be adding to their quilts.

We have 10 women in our group. That means that 9 ladies besides me will be working on my quilt and I will be working on 9 different quilts. All themed. Here is my wandering quilt.

Our group runs January 2017 – October 2017.

The above picture is what Kathy’s quilt looked like when I received it.  You might remember my last post about it here.

I had already finished my strawberry blocks and drafted a pattern for a New York beauty block.

Here is that NY beauty.  So I like love this block.  Like really, really LOVE this block.  I could type in a gazillion heart eyes here, but you get the picture.

After I finish my Modern Priscilla quilt, this is the one I’ll be starting on for my next slow make.  However, instead of the NY beauty quarters touching, I’m going to make them separated by fabric strips.  We will go into depth on this in the future.

I seriously cannot stop staring at this block.  I LOVE it!

I was nervous about this quilt.  Violet did an amazing job on her side which I was supposed to balance with my own and Lara’s pineapples!  They were perfect.

I was literally gaga over this quilt, and I didn’t want to mess it up.

Which I thought was very possible.  When you are quilting for someone else you just never know.

I quickly made my strawberry blocks and the NY beauty and then proceeded to drag my feet until the very last moment.

I had decided that I would make that hipster llama despite the fact that I REALLY (I’m using that word a lot this morn) did not want to make it.  It just felt right though.  He was part of a set that included the hipster fox on the left of this quilt, so it needed to be done.

And so I did it.

And I cussed, and I threw things, and I just complained to high heaven.  That was the most pain in the rear paper piecing pattern I have ever made.  I will NEVER make him again.

He had the tiniest of pieces and there were gazillions of them.  The hardest part was keeping up with all the different colors that were meant to be used.  You can see in my picture above that I glued which fabric was for which.  This is the first pattern I’ve ever used that had a paper piecing chart for sections plus a chart for colors.  But you had to do it that way to get the shading correctly done.

So, without further ado…..

Meet my hipster llama.

Yes, he is pretty spectacular.  The hardest things usually are (last week I climbed 8000+ feet to get on top of a mountain and was really questioning myself.  The view though….).  I still dislike him very much for being a pain, but I can’t argue with how cool he is.

Now look closer and closer.

He has LOTS of mistakes (please don’t point them out to me, I can see them).  I decided to let them be.  Sometimes you just have to let it go.  He’s good enough.

Now I had my llama, strawberries and NY beauty.  Those were my time consuming addition, but I had to add everything together and I just LOVED the way Violet did that on her side.  She pieced everything together in an improv looking way, but used bit and pieces and a few traditional blocks.

By the way, if you don’t know Violet, here is her IG feed, and here is her fabric shop.  She is amazingly creative.  This is my second traveling group with her and she always knocks it out of the park.  I cannot say enough great things about her.  Plus, she is super sweet and helpful.

On my table, I’m trying to do that same thing Violet did.  Piece my blocks in very randomly.

Here are my three tips for random strippy piecing which I’ve done quite a bit:

– always cut everything to the half inch.  It will help you count more smoothly without headaches

– Break everything into sections.  For example, first I wrapped a strawberry in other fabrics.  That was one section.

– and lastly, know how big each section needs to be.  Each section needed to be the width of the llama or if I was doing two sections they needed to equal to the llama.

And here is my addition attached to Kathy’s quilt.

You can see more about what I mentioned before about sections.

Under the llama, that strawberry is put into a section.  The section begins where the llama ends and it ends where the NY beauty begins.  It’s the same width as the llama and I randomly chose a height.

The NY beauty section is a little different.  It begins at the NY beauty top and goes to the bottom of the quilt, but it’s only a little more than half the width of the llama.  It’s more of a column section.

The second and third strawberry is their own section as well.  They are also in column form.  If you look closely, you can see the straight line seam that separates their section with the NY beauty section.  So I had four sections:  the llama, the first strawberry, the NY beauty and the other strawberries.

And I just randomly pieced until they were the correct size.

I hope this is making sense.  It’s much fun to piece this way.  It’s very random looking, and you just never know quite what you are going to get.

I do feel my side is a little busy compared to Violet’s.  Probably because of those faux patchwork fabrics from C&S, but I was running out of fabric, and had to make do.

I am pretty pleased at the same time.

Next up is something more simpler.  A woodsy botanical quilt.  More on that soon.

Helpful Links

Hipster llama pattern

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