Cutting, Posing, Stitching

While I've been away from blogging for the past week plus, I've been busy.  First I finished cutting up all the batiks with my Accuquilt GO cutter.  Grandson Cove helped me with one pass  :)  This is for the Beach Cottage project (Scrap Basket Surprises book) and that means the last of four UFO boxes are all prepped and ready to stitch at last--with a sigh of relief they are moved one step closer to becoming quilts someday.  I can cross off another from the 2017 UFO Challenge list, yay!

The four color groups will hopefully have enough variety in hue to make sharp looking blocks.

A closer look at the dark browns.  My Central Coast Quilt Shop Hop purchases make up a good portion of those pictured. 

As for the posing part, my friend Toni sent a few shots of our Shop Hop goodbye photo that her husband took.

This is me grimacing after my sister trampled my toe causing me to pull my foot right out of my sandal, and Toni laughing at her husband taking photos of us while we were arguing about it! 

That's better.  The Cotton Boll in Morro Bay is right along Highway 101 and has a great ocean view from the front; our pose was taken 'round the back.

The weekend included a lot of stitching.  At our Modern Guild we had a Scrap Box Swap and the deadline for the finished quilted project was looming.  I had previously sorted, pondered and re-sorted the mostly scrap strips I received, but hadn't hit upon an idea I liked until I saw this quilt on the blog A Quilter's Table.   I thought it just right for my partner Judy's scraps.  Our swap rules allowed adding fabric and I chose black and white prints from the inspiration quilt, and set about sewing random-width strips into chunks. 

The narrower blocks were trimmed to 6 inches wide.  There was a lot of cutting and sewing to get everything fitted together.  However, it seemed there were still so many scraps left and the quilt needed a backing.  I added some solid gray and was lucky to find leftover black binding in my bin that was just the right length for this small quilt. 

The disparate scraps made the quilt two sided.  (My binding is not really wavy, I think the spray basted layers made the quilt stiff.)

 Straight line quilting randomly spaced and the black binding finished it off. 

I included one row of a different stitch in the quilting just for fun. My swap partner immediately recognized where I took the inspiration, as Debbie of A Quilter's Tale is a blog friend of hers.  How about that?  It was a fun reveal at guild as many members had joined in.  I don't have a photo yet of the wonderful little quilt I received from my partner.  

There was a lot more cutting, stitching and posing for the Bonnie Hunter workshop I attended, but I'll save that for the next post.