Inspiration

I have been following the Canadian Blogathon this week, put on by SewSisters, and it has inspired me to get back to my blog. (That and the guilt of my gramma telling me I don't blog enough). I have a friend coming over this afternoon so that we can craft together, but I thought since I have a little time, I would go ahead and post my latest project.

It started as a shoe box full of "squares" that I inherited from a quilter who retired. (I still maintain that's the best way to grow your fabric stash). I decided that I should do something useful with them, so my friend and I set to work. We scoured pinterest, and other sites, looking for quilts that made good use of small squares. (by the way I put squares in quotations earlier because they were mostly rectangles with sides ranging in length from 3 1/4 to 4 inches...I'm not sure what project they were originally intended for, but apparently uniformity didn't matter). Once we picked out a few ideas that we liked, we got out my shoe box and began sorting. At first I thought it was going to be a lost cause. I had a hard time finding a quilt out of all of the incoherent squares. But we just starting playing, and we managed to come up with something that worked.

We did a basic nine patch with coloured squares around the outside and a white square in the middle. We made both blue and brown squares. We tried not to over think things, or worry if colours matched perfectly. Once we had our blocks laid out we had to square up all the "squares". We ended up working with a 3 1/4" square since that was the lowest common denominator among all the squares we chose. After that it was just a matter of stitching things together.

I puttered away at it whenever I had some spare time (side note: it is so nice to have a craft room and not have to set up and take down from the dinning room every time I want to craft). I used some other inherited fabric for the sashing, and since I'm not really one for square quilts, I made the sashing between the rows half the size of the sashing between the columns.

I didn't just want to alternate blue and brown squares, so I played around and came up with this layout (I have a hard time letting go of symmetry). Once it was all put together I gave it to a friend to machine quilt. She asked how I wanted it quilted, but I am still stuck in a hand-quilting mind set and had a hard time thinking outside those confines, so I left it up to her. Less than a week later she returned it looking like this:

She quilted nested squares inside the nine patches, and in the sashing she quilted bubbles. I love it. Thanks Marg for your hard work and creativity!

I attached the binding and it was done. I had decided when I started the project that since the fabric was all free to me, I would give back and donate it to Project Linus. I hope it helps someone when they need it, and that they enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.