Brown Crush

Still plugging along with my 100 Day Project, aka 100 days of scraps, I dumped my scrap basket out and gathered all of my brown scraps and pieced them into a big ole slab.

Then I used my 12" Clammy ruler, and cut out circles, not quite sure what I was going to do with them.

After auditioning several solids (I was originally thinking blues), I settled on Kona Crush, the Kona Color of the Year, as the background fabric, and then played around with layouts. Here's the one I finally chose:

I'd purchased two yards of Crush when it was released, where normally, I just purchase fabrics in half- or one-yard increments. So having two yards on hand was fortuitous, considering I thought it went really great with the browns.

For the quilt back, I went with a pieced back, using both scraps and stash finds, amazed I had some multi-colored prints that were perfect with the Crush + brown mix.

For quilting, I used Aurifil Forty3, a 40wt 3ply thread, 2360 [Chocolate] with 40wt 2360 in the bobbin on all the brown fabrics, and 50wt 2230 [Medium Peony] on the Crush. Considering this was a scrappy quilt with no end purpose in mind, I decided to play a bit, and actually did free motion organic circles in the brown pieced circles, seven in each. I marked them with a chalk marker, using a water glass as a template, then just kind of went for it. Perfect it's not, but I love the look. 

In the background, I went back with my walking foot and did a combo of echoing the circles, and straight lines in all the Crush sections. After all that was done, I went back and used coordinating thread to stitch a simple outline in each of the 'corner' sections. Three quilting designs in one quilt? That may be a record for me. haha

And just for fun, I overlabeled this one - my personal labels from gutenTAGs; as well as other fun ones from SarahHEARTS.

So I really enjoyed this one, making up the design as I went, and trying a few things that weren't my norm. At 41" square, it was a perfect project during my focus on using up scraps.