Voila!

In case anyone stayed tuned, my “gathering up the leftovers” quilt is done!

While I worked on it there were a few times I thought I should just stop wasting anymore time, sweat and thread and just put it in the trash. Plus the pattern was harder to execute than I thought. And the seams were a challenge. I spent close to two hours just pressing the seams the right way before putting the quilt sandwich together.

“Nevertheless, she persisted!’  I kept telling myself it was the kind of quilt our grandmothers would make, wanting to put every piece of good fabric to use, no matter the aesthetic outcome. So I used our grandmothers as inspiration to keep going. And now that it’s done I am happier with it than I thought I would be.  Maybe it’s like one of those creatures we love all the more precisely because of their imperfections. Precisely because they try so hard and are so earnest!

Some of the fabrics in it do make me smile. Especially the way the colorful insects and birds appear to fly and crawl randomly across the surface, playing hide-and-seek with the viewer.

I also love that the minimal quilting (stitch-in-ditch with dark blue thread) makes the quilt very soft and drapeable. For a bit of surface texture I added a little handquilting here and there. And I like the vintage print I found for the backing.

But I’m  ready to be done with it now.  I’ll just have to think of another way to use the stack of triangles I still have left. Anyone interested in some 4 1/4″ 60 degree triangles? I’ll be happy to mail them!

One of the tests of whether I truly love a finished quilt is whether I want to sleep under it at night. I’m happy to say that the last two nights I’ve slept wonderfully.

Here are the photos of my lovely ugly little scrap quilt.