CA-bound #4: Sinewy Spiderweb

Quilt #4 sent to Robert Kaufman for the #quiltsforCA drive.

Yep, I still like spiderwebs!

Rummaging through drawers of half-finished projects/mind's-eye projects/extra blocks from exchanges, I uncovered a starter stash of these triangles, the grey center fabric secured to the phone book page with the black strips. That was all. The rest of each triangle was empty, ready to be filled with random strings. This was done before the MaDan Stacked Blocks, so I still had an ample supply (this top barely seemed to make a dent in the string bins).

I had seen this intriguing layout on Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville site, on this blog entry. This design is featured on the cover of her latest book (no affiliation, despite that impression with all the links I'm putting in this post), but she was generous enough to share her process back when she was making that cover quilt.

It caught my eye, and I was determined to try it out some day.

Into the webs went a bunch of scraps left over from other pieced projects, especially a project started 20 years ago (a red, white, and blue Bethlehem Star from Diana McClun & Laura Nownes' book "Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!!") Back in 2016 I uncovered the final stash of these stars, along with the surplus strips I had made of the rw&b fabrics (using the piecing technique in the book). The stars were all used up (future blog fodder), finally,

and most of the strips, but a few crumbs remained and were tossed into the string bin. Picked apart, the scraps would've been useless, but kept together they made for interesting variations in the webs:

With the grey/black stripe/scrappy pattern well established by the middle, it was easy to figure out how I wanted to border this top out to a bigger finished size. The innermost border effectively used up 2 novelty fabrics that were each too small to do the job by themselves, but worked quite well teamed together.

The scrappy border was already made as a result of the MaDan Stacked Blocks project I had started while this flimsy was on the design wall.

In the layering and pinning of the quilt sandwich, I got a little too "greedy" with the edges. Rather than centering everything on the backing flannel, I scooched the top as far to one corner as I though I could, the idea being I'd end up with 2 large strips of flannel trimmings instead of 4 skimpy trimmings.

Turned out, it was a scooch too far. As one would expect, this detail didn't reveal itself until the sandwich was mostly quilted.

I recovered by creating an embroidered label and applying it to that corner to flesh out the fabric, zigzagging the flannel securely to the muslin. It's not a mistake I intend to make again, but I was glad I could fix it fairly painlessly.

The pins are 1/8" in from the edge. There was no way to cheat this skimpy corner!

As a final trying-to-use-it-up gesture on this quilt, I selected another novelty fabric that I never know how to use:

Will the gold withstand several washings? Is it scratchy?

The "wrong" side looks almost wholly black, which is what I wanted for the binding. Turned glitter-side-in, the concerns about washability and scratchiness were irrelevant! I will definitely be using the backside of this fabric in more projects.