Honey Bee Table Runner - Sunny Saturday / Table Scraps

 

The sun has been trying to come out this week, still a bit overcast but signs of improvement for the weekend.

Somehow I missed sharing block 70 last week in my modern block wrapup.  Featuring the pink and yellow floral from January, the backside of a hand dyed fabric from a fun afternoon with my bee and a yellow first featured in Celestial Circles (circa 2013 - but will hopefully make a comeback this year when I finally quilt it). Looking forward to seeing which blocks come up to be featured in green for March when I open the Random Number Generator.

My other big project this month is the Honey Bee Table Runner.  I told Joy at the beginning of the month that I was delighted with yellow as I had an idea percolating.

I found this layer cake by Riley Blake and immediately thought of my sister, a budding beekeeper.

I spent some time at the start of the month staring a pictures of table runners, and started leaning towards more modern designs. There are lots of cool ones out there. I originally thought of log-cabin blocks with fussy cuts of the focus fabric and fortunately asked Beth to send me the measurements of the table. Turned out it was narrower than I remembered (Dad built it decades ago), so I started to look at other options. Once I found a picture I liked, I worked to reengineer as the pattern it linked to was no longer available. The downside to working with the layercake is that I only had 3 pieces max of a fabric (and only 2 of the honeycomb in a given color). To surround the focus pieces by bees or honeycomb, I was short by about 1/2 piece. So I substituted a strip of honeycomb under each focus piece.

I played with various orders for assembly based on the focus fabric.

When I went to 'square' them up before stitching them together, I discovered that in my multiple calculations for the honeycomb strip, I wrote down the wrong width, so disassembled all six blocks and cut 1/2 inch off then reassembled. Now my blocks would finish at 12 inches tall, and I much prefer the narrower strip.

Next question, to sash or not to sash. Ultimately a 1/4 sashing strip between blocks won out. I think if I had been able to surround with bees, I might not have wanted the visual breaks. 

And then the fun started. Pulled out scraps of batting to discover non long enough - so I made frankenbatting.  I also spent a ridiculous amount of time matching up the pattern on the backing as I only had a yard of the fabric, and the runner is a few inches longer then the width of fabric, so that wasn't an option either.

Quickly basted it with binder clips holding the backing down, and several cutting mats underneath so that I had a solid surface for the pins and didn't catch them in the padding on the table.

I quilted a loopy meander in the background, wonky squares in the focus and a squiggle on the sashings.

Because I wanted the pop of a black binding, I couldn't just wrap the ample backing fabric around the front this time. I'm not sure why I repeatedly sewed strips back to front and repeated the mistake - both in initially joining strips and in trying to join them once the binding was on the quilt. I was working with a very small overlap because I trimmed the joins before realizing that I had done them wrong.

Happily it all worked out. I'm very pleased with my quilting motif. 100 weight silk thread by YLI in antique gold.

The full runner is roughly 12 x 43 and will be winging its way to the Tennessee mountain top shortly.

Linking to:

February Table Scraps Challenge

Rainbow Scrap Challenge - Scrap Happy Saturday