Scrappy Trip in Love

Finished another one of my First Quarter Hopefuls!

Last winter I made three (!) Scrappy Trips quilt tops as part of the mania that was the #scrappytripalong on Instagram. Here’s the first one, and I blogged about it here. The link to the Bonnie Hunter pattern/technique is here, in case you’re interested.

This one was more controlled to be an Irish Chain and less scrappy, since all of the fabrics came from the Amy Butler “Love” line of fabric. I had some yardage of the red dots, so I used that down the diagonal of each block, with Kona Snow on either side of it. The number of strips I had was limited, so I was only able to get a total of 16 complete blocks out of the fabrics that I had.

Then I started playing with potential designs and people voted in their comments on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The design below ended up winning, though I really liked the diagonal rows one a lot and came very close to going with that idea.

Once the top had been sewn together, the quilt top sat, for pretty much all of last year. I put Kona Snow borders on it at some point, and then layered it to be quilted. And then it sat some more.

But FINALLY, I got the quilting done. I did the quilting while trying to figure out exactly what the thread breakage issue was with my quilting machine. I chose to quilt spiraling flowers into this quilt, and it helped me be able to tell the repairman that if I sewed upwards and to the left, the thread broke every time unless I stitched so slowly that it was difficult to control the curves. In spite of that challenge, I did finish quilting the entire center of the quilt before taking the machine in for repairs. I decided that I would do the borders after the machine was less moody, so I would have to stop and bury threads every few minutes (and so my children would stop learning new words as I shrieked my frustration).

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It took three weeks to get my machine back — snow days, a conference that the repairman went to in the middle of everything, and waiting for a new foot pedal because the old one was shorting in addition to the timing problem I was having with the needle… And I celebrated by doing feathers in the border. I love quilting feathers. I puffy heart love quilting feathers. Seriously. Favorite thing ever. I recognize that building my skill base is necessary, so I don’t ALWAYS quilt feathers, but I kinda would like to. If it weren’t weird.

And then I pledged to sew the binding on the next day.

Didn’t happen. I got distracted by “Entropy.” And then “Fibonacci Squared,” which is also almost finished and I’ll post about it in the next day or two.

But I did finally finish the “Scrappy Trip in Love,” and I did the usual photo session on the fence yesterday, and posted a pic of it on Facebook with the notice that I’d sell it to anyone that might be interested — and it sold within two minutes. SO. Yay!

The buyer will pick it up on Saturday morning, and I’m very excited! It’s the second quilt I’ve sold to her (the first was the Cross quilt in this post), so that’s awesome! She gave that one to friends as a wedding gift, but this one she intends to keep. I’m happy.

“Scrappy Trip in Love,” made by Elaine Wick Poplin. Finished in March, 2014.