Topping Up the Quilt Tops

I prefer assembling quilt tops in the winter, when all the extra fabric on my lap or thrown over my shoulder is a welcome warmth, rather than a stifling heat. That said, assembling quilt tops is exactly what I've been I've been doing. I've got several king sized quilts to assemble, and I'm going to let those wait for cooler weather, but the throw sized quilts, yeah, let's get those done. 

Even DH has noticed that every time he comes to the sewing room lately, there's a different quilt on the design wall. I'm noticing the piles of blocks hanging around my space going down, which is a very good thing! It's definitely cleaning up the slow way, but actually making progress! 

This is not one large quilt, each design board holds a separate kid quilt. both of these are assembled, and I had enough blocks left to make a third and it's assembled as well. I made these blocks, and other identical blocks with a gray background using sew and flip corners. I sewed an extra line 1/2 inch away from the stitching line to get bonus HST's.

The bonus HST's became this quilt, which is also now assembled. So that's four quilt tops assembled and not piles of blocks in the sewing room anymore. I didn't add borders to any of these, nor am I going to.

Of course, I am sewing leader/ender units while I'm assembling quilts, so I'm making more blocks, but so far my leader/ender projects have been other UFO's or scrap projects. Even when I'm trying to not start new projects, I always consider a scrap project a "legal" start. If you don't keep the scraps flowing through your sewing room they will take over. 

One of the things I love about making kid or throw sized quilts, is instead of using wideback, I can bust some older fabrics on the backings. Most of these are wider than WOF, but not that much wider. Once I choose a fabric for each backing, I think I'm going to make them wider by adding a column of complementary scrap strips cut down similarly to a piano key border. It will be a great way to bust not only older fabrics but also some scrap strips from my Scrap User System, with a minimal amount of work.