Quandary

After finishing Autumn Steps several weeks ago, I kept all the leftover bits and pieces together, because I liked them so much. It seemed they just weren't ready to be relegated to the scrap baskets. It took me a while to get back to them, and when I finally did, Thanksgiving was looming, and I thought the fabrics would be perfect for a new fall table runner.

I started in on making long slabs, and that was going great for a while. But I lost interest in my original idea and set it all aside for a day or two. When the slabs failed to draw me back in, I decided to revamp and cut into the slabs with a small square ruler, putting the newly cut squares up on my design wall. I fiddled with them now and then, thought about them even more, but couldn't come up with an idea for putting them altogether. And Thanksgiving came and went.

Then, on the day after, Carolyn Friedlander happened to post about her RAY Quilt Along, and no, the squares weren't a fit for that, but in her post, Carolyn mentioned a RAY quilt inspiration board she'd created on Pinterest, and as I was looking through it, some designs (rugs actually) from The Citizenry caught my eye. And it wasn't long before I was back at my design wall rearranging those squares and mulling things over.

It took pulling a new fabric from my stash to bring the blocks together into a cohesive whole and get me to sewing it all together. The fabric was one Kristina/FabricBubb had shown on Instagram just a few weeks ago - Nikko Topstitch from Diamond Textiles. I had actually used another of their fabrics - Crossed from their Nikko Geo line - in my original project, so there were a few bits of it in this second project too. They are beautifully textured wovens, and the color I'd chosen in the Topstitch was Butter Rum.

So I added quite a bit the of the Topstitch to my pieced blocks to indeed make a table runner as I'd originally planned. For the backing, I found the perfect Denyse Schmidt Chicopee plaid in my stash. I embellished it with one small strip of scraps from the front.

For quilting, I used Aurifil 50wt #2155 [Cinnamon] and the Fancy Straight Line from Jacquie Gering's Walk book, the same design I'd used on my recent Utterly Blue. It just seemed to fit the lines of the cut slab blocks, plus it's alot of fun to execute. 

At nearly the last minute, I made another design decision of sorts. I was cutting the binding out of the remaining Topstitch, and vaguely remembered a comment Kristina had made when she'd first shown it on Instagram. Am I remembering correctly? I'm pretty sure she said something about liking the back of the fabric as well as the front. Hmm. That memory resulted in me using the back side of the fabric as the front for the binding. I had originally thought I might do matched binding again on this piece, but I really liked the idea of a similar yet different binding around the entire runner, pulling everything together. Plus it felt slightly risky. Ha. That's about how daring I am. 

Anyway, I love the look, and even though Christmas decorations will be coming out soon, I'll enjoy the new runner on my table for a few days. It finished at 18" x 54", and for something different, I placed it crossways on my table. I kinda like it!