Off the Cuff

It was weeks ago when I agreed to make a quilted wall hanging for a friend's auction, so it was silly to wait till the week it was needed to get started. But that's what went down, basically because I couldn't decide what to do!

Rummaging through my solids scrap bin for bee blocks the other day, I unearthed some leftover Improv Under the Influence strips from my class with Krista Hennebury last year. [Here's my original project.]  I found a yard of Essex Linen in Graphite in my stash, and the ingredients were sorted out.

As you can see in the top photo, my design wasn't earth-shattering, but I figured I could spice things up a notch with some improv quilting, echoing the shapes in the strips. Most of the quilting was done in Aurifil 50wt #5004 (Grey Smoke), but I did a ghost strip in #2140 (mustard), then did the same quilting in the colored strips themselves. This was fun quilting! 

In the areas without a colored strip or ghost quilting, I stuck with straight-line, in 3/8" increments. Sadly, the ghost strip isn't that noticeable in the finished quilt - a good reason to try some thicker thread for accent quilting like this. Note to self!



Of course there was one strip that called out for some matched-binding, and why not?

Finishing at 34 x 42", I'm not quite sure this little quilt has a style that will most appeal to the auction crowd, but I managed to create it from stash and had fun making it up as I went, which was a good deal for me.