spare pennies

i hardly know what to think of myself - i got this quilt top fully assembled in a few days! so unusually speedy for me. it felt like my first penny patches took for.ev.er and a day. probably because i was much more concerned about fabric placement with those.

penny patches can turn into a huge game of fabric sudoku if you care about spreading the fabrics out and get really caught up in the balance of everything. but since this was a quilt of leftovers, that happened a lot less. it was kind of like, "well, let's just get these pieces used and this top made."

i did end up with two of those large blue squares caddy-corner to each other, but it's not that big a deal. in reality, i kind of wish i hadn't used them in this project at all. without them, this would have a much lighter, low-volume feel. but that's ok.

what is a little sad to me is that i thought all the pieces of the fabrics i used for this quilt were in the same box and had to pull some other fabrics to fill in the squares i needed to make the full top. and i had to purchase/order backing fabrics, which i got enough of for two more quilts. then, when i was cleaning out my sewing room yesterday, i found a whole stack of these fabrics piled away in a place i didn't at all expect! ugh. i could have made the quilt a little more cohesive and saved some money, too. that's the problem with owning too much fabric - it can get lost in the masses. i am trying to remedy that.

beyond the surprise of getting the top for this quilt finished so quickly, i got the backing made and the quilt sandwich basted in one evening and began quilting it today! can you even believe i got two-thirds of it done in one night?

i can't.
who am i?

the muscle memory on the orange-peel/dogwood petal quilting came right back and i zipped through it. this might be done and ready to bind this week!

something curious i noticed while quilting that i never have before: the initial pinwheel design i do, which is half the shape of the orange peel, looks like apple core on the back where there are no grid lines to draw attention to the pinwheel shape.

maybe you can see what i'm talking about in the two photos above? secondary designs like that are so interesting.

i make the pinwheel/apple core design because i work my way down a row, curving back and forth in this fashion, forming half of the peel/petal design, and then make my way back up the row to finish it out. this is my preferred way to move through this particular design.

you can actually go quite a ways like this, doing several rows or blocks in one direction before turning back around. you just need to pay attention to not cutting yourself off on accident and follow the path you can down.