Stage 3, Stage 2, Stage 1

Stage 3: a finish!

That's not a good way to look at this top, but it's the best fit on the fence I use to hold my quilts for their photo-ops. Here it is rotated:

71" x 89"

I made the "back" to look as different as possible from the "front", so it could be used/shown on a bed year 'round.

You may recognize those floral strips. They were the leftovers from this project (another 2-sided quilt finished a year ago), and the "green" fabric was the remains from the back of this project.

 

I knew from the get-go that I wanted to quilt the panels with a light grey thread, using a pattern that gave a snowdrift/wind effect. This is the one I chose--Lava Lamp--from Quilting Creations.

I used the grey for the entire panel, and as you can see it's practically invisible on the barn. A magic color, to be sure.

Once those were done, however, I needed to think about the corners and how to approach them.

Initially I considered a dark red for the red triangles and a navy for the blues, but finally decided on a purple, the same purple (YLI "Plum") I used to quilt--using a simple wavy line--the brown borders of each panel . Introducing the threads themselves (the King Tut "Date Palm" on the right was in the bobbin for it all):

A couple of free-motion simple fillers took care of the large points, and a straight stitch along the M followed by a curve at the base of each side of the inner star took care of those.

The light stitches were done in the grey thread.

To quilt the rest of each corner, however, I needed to find another flow-y pattern that fit into a square, and this one, also from Quilting Creations--Modernish 3--fit the bill.

That would do nicely for the four quadrants of each corner, but there needed to be a traveling pattern to get from one section to the other. Simple enough, one would think, but I'd made things a bit challenging for myself. As I'd quilted each brown border of the panels, I'd taken a detour and used the plum thread to quilt a figure 8 in the red rectangles along the outer edges of the corner blocks.

I obviously didn't need to quilt those segments again, so the traveling pattern needed to avoid those red rectangles.

After a bit of sketching, I settled on something that pulled in the basic elements of the Modernish 3 pattern, and traced it onto some Glad Press'n Seal. With that, I could seamlessly quilt from one quadrant to the next and fill in everything in between.

A simple cross-hatch (using grey and plum as/where needed) finished the center section.

Huh--managed to take a picture of the one spot I missed quilting! I'll get right on that!

I bound this quilt with a light grey/blue Moda fabric that's been lurking about for far too long.

Stage 2: a flimsy.

All the batik scraps from this post were sewn into one long, enormously long, jellyroll strip which was then mostly sewn to itself again, and again, until it was (they were?) assembled into 63 randomly pieced 6.5" x 10.5" blocks. To the long sides of each were sewn one hundred twenty-six 2.5" x 10.5" white rectangles, the whole lot sewn together, and the result hung on the design wall to be admired for a while.

Stage 1: the next thing.

This showed up in an orphaned bag at the June Community First! Quilters meeting.

It measures 24" x 36", and I'm trying to figure out how to showcase the black/white prints while expanding it to, at the very least, a lap- or wheelchair-sized piece. I'm leaning heavily toward cutting it into twenty-four 6" squares, but how to flesh them out from there....