the Scrap Hoover Quilt Top

Phew! It's finally finished! It's sort of a bittersweet ending to piecing this top - I'm happy to move on to new, shiny projects but at the same time I'll miss scrap bin diving and coming up with wild, random fabric combinations for this.

So here it is. I wish I could have gotten better photos but the grey Seattle weather is not going to cooperate. The whole thing measures in at a nice 80x80 size. If you haven't been following any of my progress on this, the quilt is a pattern from Sarah Fielke in Material Obsession 2 called the Maple Leaf Rag. It is essentially a spiderweb with crazy-pieced "kites" instead of the traditional solid for the background of the webs, making it the perfect way to use up all those too-tiny scraps. It really has made quite a dent in the old scrap bin, although I think I may be in the minority when I confess that such a lack of scraps on hand makes me nervous.

As long as we're on the subject of confessions, I must also confess that my piecing of this thing is atrocious. If you look closely, you'll see that almost none of the rings on my webs match up. As soon as I started sewing blocks together and I saw that this was going to be a problem throughout the quilt (most likely due to my inaccurate cutting, trimming and then stretching of the bias-cut muslin triangles) I threw a miniature internal tantrum and walked away from it for a day. After calming down I then realized that it really didn't matter - it's such a riot of color and pattern it hardly detracts from the whole thing once all together. But, if you're a bit anal in your piecing and want to attempt this pattern, consider yourself warned. 

This quilt, even with all it's imperfections, is going to be very, very loved. And I'm happy to say, it will be shipped off next week to the most talented of quilters - my very first professionally quilted quilt. So look for it again in a few weeks after Angela works her magic on it. I can hardly wait.