A Little Finish with a Long Story

I call this little doll quilt, Upcycled Shoo Flies, because it was begun when I was cleaning up some small red and pink and white scraps (from making free-pieced loving words for the Block Lotto) on my work table and instead of tossing them, I made a dozen 4-inch liberated shoo fly blocks. The finished little quilt measures 19 by 24 inches.

If you like the wonky shoo fly blocks and think you'd like to make some of your own, check out my tutorial, Three Ways to Wonkify a Traditional Quilt Block.

After I put them together into this top, I wasn't quite happy with it.  When I won a strip of a vintage sheet, I  remade it with some of the floral strips.

When I came back to this quilt early this year, I thought it would be fun to try quilting from the back in the plain border. I didn't have enough of the floral sheet for a back, so I pieced the back and used it fo borders on the back. First, I quilted the center of the quilt–feathers winding around the white background, outlining, then echoing the print in the floral strips. Then I flipped the quilt over, used painters' tape to mark the inside edge of the border and quilted the borders by outlining, then echoing the flowers in the print.

I felt like Murphy's law started working overtime as soon as I decided to finish up this long-ago pieced quilt.  I mentioned earlier this week how I started quilting it shortly after my Bernina came back from a trip to the dealer for a routine maintenance.  Actually it was exactly 2 weeks after ... and the machine stopped working (again) soon after I started quilting the feathers in the white background.

When I resumed the quilting earlier this week, I managed to get to the borders before I ran out of thread. Usually, I celebrate when I finish off a coneof thread ... but not this time. I didn't have any more of the Lace White thread, but I was feeling so motivated to finish this silly little lark of a project, so I decided to use another "white" of the same type of thread.

A couple nights ago, I was determined to keep going until it was done ... my cat, Grace Hopper, had other ideas and late Wednesday night, insisted I stop quilting and go upstairs to bed now.

I was able to finish yesterday evening ... and Grace was happy to keep me company while I stitched down the binding late last night. I had pulled out the last of the vintage sheet with a plan to use it for a hanging sleeve, but decided I liked it for the binding.  The tiny pink piping was added using Susan Cleveland's Piping Hot Binding technique.

Here are a few more detail photos of the finished quilt.



This sweet little girly doll quilt makes me smile because it's truly a silk purse made from a sow's ear: a recycled sheet and small scraps that were on their way to the trash. Even though crazy things kept going wrong and a bossy cat got in the way, it's finally done.

Now I just have to decide where to hang it and appreciate it for a while.

I'm celebrating this finish by joining the linky parties on:
Can I get a Whoop Whoop?
Finish It Up Friday
Link a Finish Friday

And because Grace helped so much with this quilt:
Feline Friday