March Round Up

 I spent more time sewing this month and more time planning. Both positives!

One Monthly Goal & Projects Half Done

I have a finish for the month! I completed the Sunflower Table Runner at long last! This was my OMG for March and one of my PhD in 2022 nominations. This is one of the projects in Quilter's Academy Vol 1 - Freshman Year by Harriet Hargrave and Carrie Hargrave. Class 170: Lesson 4: Combined Grids. The lesson in this project was YUMS - Your Unique Measurements. One key to a YUM is consistency in your seam allowance so that your pieces fit together correctly.

As I prepared to finish this quilt, I thought about a variety of quilt plans and motifs - one of which included huge feathers coursing across the runner.

In the end, I decided on  more modest plan with continuous curve flowers centered on each yellow patch, and a loopy meander through the rest of the background. The borders are quilted with an echoed chain of swirls. The echoes came in to play when I felt like the initial swirls were smaller than they should be and rather than pull them out to start over, I started echoing.

A couple other decisions were made on the fly. I picked out a cute floral fabric from my stash for the back. When the time came to sandwich the quilt, that length of fabric was nowhere to be found. So, I looked at my bag of scraps for this quilt and found that there was still a good sized piece of the border fabric left. Not wide enough for the full back, but close enough that I could attach some of the scatter fabric used on the front to each side to make it wide enough.

I also created a Frankenbatting from the offcuts of the Starbright quilts to use up scraps. 

I used a red blender to bind the quilt that was in my scrap bag, but turned out not to be the same red that was used in the body of the quilt, Happily, at a distance from the center, it is not clashing. I practiced binding by machine and decided I really don't like the process. I find it frustrating as I still haven't managed to attach the binding to the first side and leave the appropriate amount to fold over. Some of my hiccups will be less obvious once the runner is washed. I do need to create a label for this (as well as some of my other recent finishes).

This finish brings my total UFO finishes for the year to 5!

Linking to:

One Monthly Goal - March Finish - Hosted by Elm Street Quilts

PhD in 2022 - March - Hosted by Quilting Gail