Stashbuster Finish!

On February 23 Judy Laquidara issued a challenge to her blog readers to try a project made completely from stash. She also added an incentive -- a a chance to win a pair of Gingher "Glory" scissors for all who posted a completed top.

One of my goals this year is to try to work more from stash (well, actually to work from stash and "Hussies" (HSYs: Haven't Started Yets) since I've purchased quite a bit of fabric and have compiled quite a few potential projects in the last few years. Also I want to try to make more "quick" projects to have on hand to practice machine quilting. So this challenge was right up my alley. This is Judy's design for the project: http://www.patchworktimes.com/2009/03/04/stash-project-revealed/

And here's my finish:

O.k. so I strayed a bit (?!?!) off the design course. One thing I realized early on in my quilting journey was that I like shaded (black tinged) fabrics and the fabrics used for the blocks bore that out. When I put the blocks together, I found the colors to be very rich which made it hard to choose background fabrics. I liked both the red and rust used here so decided to use both as alternating setting triangles! That meant I had to figure out how to incorporate the floating corner patches -- I chose to just make blocks that followed the alternating sequence.

Then the challenge was to find a border print to go with all of this. The print I used was in with fabrics for another project but I liked the way it looked with these blocks. I had to add the inserts in the border since I only had a yard of the fabric and it is directional so I had to make it stretch.

This was a challenge but also a lot fun to do. And it gave me the incentive to start a blog so two for one!