Another Wedding Quilt Finished!

My plan of FMQ one hour a day is working far better than I expected. In fact, I just hit the halfway point on the last quilt I have ready to quilt.

Here is my third finish of the five overdue wedding quilts.

The quilt pattern is called Going Up and is free on Craftsy. It is 72x84, which is far smaller than most of my wedding quilts, but this niece didn't want a bed quilt, just a quilt to use on the couch. Since she wanted it for the couch, I backed it with minky, which should make it fun to snuggle. She asked for a modern quilt in neutrals, and I mostly stuck with that. The background is a tan, and most of the fabrics are browns or grays. Her wedding photo shoot was very urban, very creative and inspiring to me. The fabric line I chose to showcase is vintage style urban prints, signs, clocks, maps and such. I'm hoping she likes it.

I've started working on her sister's wedding quilt in earnest now. It's my first bargello. I waited to work on this wedding quilt until I had my design wall done, and I'm so glad I did! I would hate to have to keep all these strips straight without a design wall!

These aren't all the strips, I have some by my sewing machine. Since it is my first bargello, I opted for an easy pattern, no going up and down, just up. When she asked for a quilt in red and green I knew it was going to be hard to not have it look Christmas-y, so I tried to avoid the normal shades of red and green used in Christmas decorations. I also added brown, and I found a gorgeous fabric with a brown background for borders. I won't know until it's done if I succeeded, but I'm liking it so far. 

I'm using one of my grandson's quilts as leaders/enders while I sew those bargello strips. I should get the first half of his blocks done today. The plan is to have his quilt top finished at the same time this bargello quilt top is finished. If I can manage that, I'll have the last two of the overdue wedding quilts and two quilts for grandsons ready for the next basting spree. 

I haven't started cutting out any of the next batch of quilts. I knew all the long cuts for the bargello quilt was going to bother my arm, and it did. I want to get the two quilt tops I'm currently working on finished more than I want to cut out new quilts, so cutting isn't a priority right now. I do have some scraps from the last couple finishes that need to be dealt with, so I may get those cut for my scrap user system a little along, before I start cutting all the new quilts. 

My strip drawers are overflowing right now, which is sad because usually I am so good about using them. I've found that I'm not using any of my scraps these days, because I'm concentrating so hard on UFO's. My UFO's are already all cut out, so the only stash I'm using on finishing them is for backings. It's like I can use scraps, or finish UFO's, but not both. Finishing the UFO's is also creating scraps, cutoffs from backings, leftovers from borders, misc. fabrics I kept with the UFO to use just in case I had miscalculated. If those fabrics aren't at least 12" WOF or a fat quarter if half WOF, I strip it for the scrap user system. It's a little hard to see my strip drawers so full, but I know there will come a day when I'm caught up on the deadline quilts, and can just play with my scraps. 

The blue and white wedding quilt I finished in my last post, was a great example of me using my scrap strips. Every single blue strip in that quilt came right out of my scrap user system. Only the white accent fabric was yardage. That was a really easy pattern, and uses a ton of scraps, so I think I'm going to make some of those twin sized, in whichever colors I'm drowning in. I really liked the fact that the pattern uses so little of the accent fabric. A lot of scrap patterns I see use more background fabric than scraps, and that doesn't really help you tame the scraps. Any time I find a pattern that uses more scraps than background, it's a keeper, and I know I'll use it multiple times, even resizing blocks or changing layouts for different sized quilts.