Design Wall Monday--2/24/20 Mixed Bag

Another week flies by--its Design Wall Monday again.  See more design walls on Judy's Small Quilts and Doll Quilts blog.  As usual, my design wall is a mixed bag :)

Our guild's Pizza Box round robin ended earlier this month and we all got our blocks back after 12 rounds. Each participant picked a block design and provided fabrics placed in a pizza box.   I chose Grayscale Quilt blocks (Cluck Cluck Sew tutorial)  in solid green and white--I provided directions and fabric.  Midway through the swap, one member asked if they could use a different color, and I said yes to another solid color.  Somehow this translated into mixed colors in the blocks; not my intention, but there you go :)  Since 12 blocks isn't really enough to make a quilt, I am sewing up 8 more in the opposite orientation with a white instead of colored starting square.  There are so many ways to set these blocks; I'll do a 4x5 setting for a 48x60" lap quilt.

I woke up very early Saturday morning and decided to make my Mom a little something for her birthday--we were celebrating it with dinner out Saturday.  I began with rummaging around the extra parts drawer--do you have one of those?  I found a bunch of trimmed pieces made in the wrong colorway for a quilt I made our younger daughter a few years back.  I thought they would make good edging for a small table mat and poked around in the fat quarter dresser for options, finally settling on a pretty fat quarter my sister in law Laura brought me from Japan a few years ago.  

Five of the extra parts made about a 20 inch strip and I trimmed the FQ to size once they were sewn together. Since so many of the squares were left, I decided to make a tablemat for Laura too.  The hardest part was choosing backing and binding fabrics, but once again stash and the leftover binding drawer were helpful. 

For Mom I chose a dark browny-gray binding and the never-ending white berry spray fabric on mustard for the back.  It was fun to quilt some zig zags through the print with dark gray thread after I stitched in the ditch with neutral thread on the triangles and edges of the center panel. 

I was happy with the way it turned out.  For Laura, I switched things up a little, flipping the squares and trimming off some of the solid cream fabric.

The flash shows the texture of the Japanese print and backing/binding fabrics better.

Straight stitch quilting and machine stitched binding.  Both ladies were very pleased with the little mats.  There are enough leftover squares to do two more mats--maybe I'll make one for myself!