Quilting Sourdough Starter

 Have you ever made sourdough starter for bread, and kept it going for a while? If you want to use the starter past the first time, you have to keep the starter you have left, and add more ingredients to feed the starter. If you have any leftover dough, you can toss that into the starter as well. 

I asked that because I approach quilting a lot like making sourdough starter. I often make too many units, because I don't often bother to count them. I'll estimate them, and go for too many rather than too few every time. 

A few years ago, I made a radiating nine patch quilt for a wedding gift. I needed 60 nine patches each of several different colorways. I strip pieced the nine patches, but the required number of strip units made more nine patches than I actually needed. 

After the original wedding quilt was made, I looked over the remaining nine patches, and added some more ingredients for another quilt. I finished that second quilt today, and it will be a wedding gift too. 

This was the original quilt I made a few years ago. I still like it. The jewel toned fabrics look really rich. It looks really blue in that photo, but it is mostly purple and green.

This is the quilt I finished today. I used the leftover nine patches like sourdough starter. I added the turquoise fabric and the solid purple in the borders as new ingredients. You know how I said you can toss in any extra dough into the starter? Well, the fussy cut border was the rest of the border print I fussy cut for the first quilt's border. There were thick strips of design and thinner ones. The thick ones I used for the first quilt, the thin ones for this quilt. I ended up getting two wedding quilts for little more than the cost of one. The first one was a queen/king, the second is a throw, about 58"x76".

I have a love/hate relationship with minky. I love the way it feels, and I love how quilting looks on it, but I hate the drag it causes when quilting, and my arm really hates that. When I give a throw sized quilt as a wedding gift, I like to back it with minky because it seems luxurious, and in my mind, more suited as a wedding gift. I would never back anything larger than a throw with minky because it's so hard on my arm. I opted to use a walking foot for a lot of this quilt, and that was a good decision for my arm. I only did FMQ on the two purple borders. 

The quilting on the purple minky on the back looks pretty good!

Here's a close up of the corner from the back.

And here is a close up of the borders from the front. My quilting's far from perfect, but I'm OK with that. It's better than it used to be, and hopefully not as good as it will be someday. I'm always a sucker for variegated threads, but honestly, I've been shying away from matching threads too closely. I just find it too hard to see what I'm doing when the thread exactly matches the fabric. My mistakes and bobbles show more, but that's OK, lets them know I did it and not a computer. 

So now that I've finished one wedding quilt, I still have two to make. I'm making good headway on one of them.

This is the top right quadrant of the king sized quilt. Since I rarely make a quilt with so few fabrics, I had forgotten how much faster they are. When you go scrappy there are a lot more decisions to make about which fabric goes where. In this quilt every fabric has an assigned place, and all 100 blocks are identical. I only need to add the last two rounds to the other 75 blocks, so all of the blocks should be finished soon. 

I'm stuck on how to quilt this one. The blocks are pretty big for ruler work and a radiating design, which was my first thought. The logs are fairly thin to do a different design in each log. I'm thinking I'll quilt with grey thread, but which shade of grey I haven't decided yet. The backing fabric is a black with grey designs on it. I really want to get this wedding quilt top done and basted, and then I can work on piecing the third wedding quilt on one machine while I'm quilting this one on the Janome. I don't have any quilts basted and ready to quilt in the interim. I do have a couple quilt tops out and I've even cut the batting for one, but I haven't pieced the backings yet. 

Since this weekend is Father's Day we've got some plans. I'll be doing some misc. sewing in small bits of time, but I won't really be getting back to the sewing room until next week.