(not so) Big Quilting Weekend

This was supposed to be a big quilting weekend. I have a quilt on the frame that needs to be quilted before I can continue piecing on two baby quilts for October. It's after lunch on Sunday and my sewing machine hasn't even been turned on yet. I'm carefully ignoring...not printing & trying very hard to not even look at Quiltville's new Labor Day Weekend mystery because I'm not done with my Orange Crush and I fully intended to have it quilted by today so I could bind it during NASCAR tonight. I might still get there, but no one here is holding their breath.
My Orange Crush bears only a faint resemblance to Bonnie's pattern, but that's not her fault. It did start out as the mystery and I tried hard to embrace the busy, scrappy design and my orange fabric, but I couldn't do it. I ended up using the star blocks in this large sofa sized quilt. I added sashing & scrappy cornerstones and used up my spare 4 patch blocks in the border.

Things I learned from this quilt:

1. I hate orange, or maybe I just chose unwisely and hate MY orange. Either way, there is no orange in this Orange Crush derivative.


2. Scrappy is neat and not exclusive to sampler quilts which is the only place I've used it before. There is fabric in this quilt from my 3rd quilt, and I cut into pieces that I've been "saving" for 15 years that wouldn't have gone with anything else and it felt good to use them instead of flipping past them in the bin.


3. I learned to use my Easy Angle ruler...still in it's original packaging from who knows when. And I used it again on a baby quilt that's in progress, so not only did I learn how to use it, I successfully applied that to blocks that didn't say "use the Easy Angle here" in the directions.

What about the other half of the Orange Crush blocks?
Well, I did make 3 of them exactly as instructed. Yuck. My orange was WAY too orange and I'm not fond of the Album block pattern. It felt kind of clunky after piecing all the smaller scrappy parts and oh my eyes! That orange was way too much for my other colors in that big of a piece.

I haven't pieced them yet, but I think these other blocks are headed toward a Churn Dash/Shoe Fly arrangement with the big triangle turned in instead of out, possibly with a red center (since they are already cut) and maybe a sashing with red cornerstone to tie that together.

Thanks go to Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville.com for the inspirational design. Mystery quilts and scrap quilts probably won't become a regular thing for me, but I didn't fall over dead because everything didn't match perfectly or because I didn't know what the final product would look like.