Spare

Seventeen months after I gave the initial Minimal Shapes prompt to my Bee Sewcial @beesewcial mates, I have a quilt finish to share! I'm calling it Spare, as a reflection of its minimalistic nature.

As I shared in my Back to Minimal Shapes post back in early October, I started with the 16 blocks, made by my mates and myself, and cut them all into circles and half-circles, filling in around them with Kona Lupine and Overcast. Then I used leftovers from cutting those circles to begin a pieced quilt back, adding in solids from stash as needed to bring it up to size - Konas Hibiscus, Lighthouse, Mocha, Coffee, and Eggplant.

For quilting, I started by machine-quilting vertical straight lines using Aurifil 50wt 2520 [Violet] across the entire quilt. Though I rarely use both machine- and hand-quilting in the same quilt, this one seemed to call for it. So once the machine-quilting was completed, I used my hera marker to mark half-circles and circles in all the Lupine spaces, and hand-quilted using Aurifil 12wt 2520 [Violet]. 

Then I used Aurifil 12wt 2625 [Arctic Ice] to hand-quilt randomly in between the vertical machine-quilted lines in the gray borders and interior rectangles. First time ever, I used an entire small spool - and then some - for hand-quilting the Overcast sections on this quilt.

Once quilting was complete, it was finally time for binding, which I did with more Kona Overcast. My intent with the layout and filler fabric placement was to create a see-through illusion, with the gray portions being the 'background.' Whether or not that worked is up to the viewer, but I 'see' it, so there's that. 

The completed quilt measures 76" x 76", and it is indeed a relief to finally have this one done. Many thanks to the co-creators of Spare - Leanne Chahley @shecanquilt, Stephanie Ruyle
@spontaneousthreads, Felicity Ronaghan @felicityquilts, Karen Foster @capitolaquilter, M-R Charbonneau @quiltmatters, Jen Broemel @jen.broemel, and Irene Roderick @hixsonir - who all contributed lovely improv blocks for me to work with.