Quilting Fail? Part II {a finished quilt}

About a week ago I posted about a top for the scrap basket quilt along I wasn’t too happy with.  Here it is in all its glory:

Things I didn’t like about this top:

• no visible color scheme
• too much red in three blocks clumped on left side
• just way too much going on!
• no opportunity to do any interesting quilting

Things I did like about this top:

• it was made completely from 2.5 inch strippy scraps with not a lot of cutting necessary
• the vibrancy of the dark and light colors together

I thought a lot about what I could do to improve this top and came up with this:

I separated many of the rows from the original quilt top, moved around some blocks with red in them, and resewed together a chunk of 7 rows.  Then I added some negative space in the form of a solid gray border at the top and bottom.  Improvement?

The one thing that was nice about this new arrangement is that it allowed me a lot of blank space to try some different free motion quilting designs.

I have been watching Angela Walters’ classes on Craftsy lately, so the large and small circles are taken exactly from her class.  It took so much thread to do this design that I had to skip it for the bottom of the quilt or I might not have enough gray thread for my MQG challenge due later this month.

These concentric squares were also part of the Angela Walters class.  I have learned so much from her class and her positive attitude encouraged me to just go for it and try something new.  She was right, even with mistakes and not-so-perfect or straight stitching, the designs still look pretty good.

Angela suggests using thread that blends when you’re first starting out, but I had this black sheet I’d always intended to use for another quilt but never had.  Also I had this crazy idea that it would be fun to see exactly what the stitching looks like. 

If you squint and don’t look too closely, it looks pretty cool!

The binding is also something from my stash, a pearl bracelet fabric in metallic gray.

The finished size is 53.5” x 66.5”.  It’s ready to be mailed to Margaret’s Hope Chest.

Many thanks to Amanda Jean for organizing another quilt along!  I joined her last one 4 years ago and never finished the quilt.  That was before I could sew a consistent 1/4 inch seam allowance without tears, so maybe I should dig out that WIP and finish it up too?

I’ll be linking up to Fort Worth Fabric Studio and Crazy Mom Quilts later this week.