Little Blue Folly Finished

Edited to add the photo directly below of the quilt after washing and drying.  It now measures 13 1/4" x 16 3/4".   It's far out of kilter and has bowed sides.

Original Post:

I can hardly believe tomorrow is the first day of June!  Wasn't it January just a few weeks ago?

This is Little Blue Folly, my One Monthly Goal for May.  Specifically, the goal was to finish the top, which I did on the 24th but I forgot to take photos then.  I kept going and layered, basted, and began quilting it.  Below is a photo of it with the quilting finished.  More than half the border is stitched down on the back.  I expect to finish it tonight.

It is a different quilt than I thought it would be when I started.  After playing around with sashing of different sizes, and then circles of different sizes, I finally decided that the red triangles were the best choice.  They are small and subtle but I "enhanced" them by quilting around them with red thread.  Really very subtle. 

I used two strands of embroidery floss to quilt lines, mostly vertically but sometimes on the horizontal.

The quilt measures 14 1/8" x 17 1/4".  The batting is one layer of flannel for batting and I'm sure it will shrink after it's washed and dried.  I cut the single-fold binding at 1".  For this particular quilt I think a 1 1/4" strip would have been better, simply because there are a lot of seams on the edges.  That 1" strip was a tight fit.

This is not a quilt I love.  I like it and I enjoyed making it but I probably won't make another like it.

As I was playing with options I realized many ideas would have worked, maybe even better, and that if I wanted to try out the other options I could always make more blocks and play again.  Sometimes I have the mindset that there's only one best way for a particular quilt to be made and that I must find it.  Definitely not so!

After this is washed and dried I'll probably post another photo and its measurements.

This month I'm also participating in The Constant Quilter Wendy's Monthly Mini link-up.  Visit her blog for links to other quilters who have made miniature quilts.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this was my One Monthly Goal for May so I'm linking this post to One Monthly Goal May Finishes at Elm Street Quilts where you can find finishes to goal others have set.

Thank you both, Wendy and Patty, for hosting the link-ups.

--Nancy.

Little Blue Folly

A folly, in an architectural sense, is an expensive, ornamental building that serves no practical purpose.  The little quiltlet I'm making is obviously neither a building nor expensive but it definitely serves no purpose other than using up scraps of fabric so for now I'm calling it Little Blue Folly.  As always, the colors in the accompanying photos are not truly accurate.

My original idea for this quilt was a background of blue/green/teal/mostly blue scraps of fabric, cobbled into small blocks, cut into squares, and sewn together with red circles appliqued where the squares intersect.  (At top of drawing, above.)  In my imagination it looked like red circles on a field of blue.

And then another idea popped up:  narrow black sashing with red where the squares intersect.  I'm going to have to play with this idea a bit to keep the red from overtaking the black.  Or maybe I'll go with circles.  Or maybe circles on top of the squares.  Or maybe... I'll just play for a while.

So my One Monthly Goal for May is to play, decide, and sew these squares and whatever else goes with them into a little top.  Maybe I'll get to layering, basting, maybe even quilting and a binding, but those aren't my goal.  Just the top sewn together is my goal for this month.

I'm linking this post to One Monthly Goal May Link-up at Elm Street Quilts.  Patty has been hosting this link-up for years (and years) and I'm so grateful she continues because it keeps me on track with at least one creative endeavor every month.  Thank you, Patty.  Click the link to see the beautiful quilts others are creating.

I'm also linking this post to
> Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts
> Peacock Party at Wendy's Quilts and More
> Oh Scrap! at Quilting is more fun than Housework
Thank you for hosting, Alycia, Wendy, and Cynthia.

Thanks for visiting!
--Nancy.