Mostly Clear mostly done

Since I last posted I reorganized my sewing area, opening it up to the family room, which also required resetting and decluttering the family room.  That took over about a week of my life but it feels great to have a renewed and uncluttered space.  I am in the mood to design and sew again, so the time investment was definitely worth it.

The first project from the renewed studio is Mostly Clear.  I think this quilt holds the record for shortest turnaround time from design to finished top in the history of Canuck Quilter.

I played with the design in late July, settling on final layout two weeks ago, and started writing the pattern.  This is backwards for me.  I usually do the required math, sketch some rough notes, then make the quilt to make sure the quilt looks good in real size as opposed to small picture on a page. I have all the bugs and any required design changes worked out before investing time in writing a polished pattern.  This time I wrote the entire pattern, working out all the details on paper first, then sewed following my pattern.

My husband and I took a day off to roam that Friday. We stopped at Mended Hearts Quilting and he was very patient while I pulled bolt after bolt trying to choose 4 fabrics that went together just so.  I found several sets of three, but the fourth one was never quite right.  I finally found a fourth that was good enough, bought the set, then happily found a fourth that was better when we stopped at It's Sew Tempting after a picnic lunch.

By Sunday night I had all my fabric cut and strip sets sewn.

Monday I sewed all the blocks.  Lots of chain piecing...

...and corner trimming....

...and seam matching. There are a lot of seams to match, but I planned all the pressing directions ahead of time and every.single.seam nested.  Happiness is a nicely nested, matched seam intersection!

Tuesday I sewed the blocks into rows.  Wednesday evening I sewed the rows into sections and the sections into a quilt top.

It was just past midnight when I finished the top.  Rosie did try hinting about bedtime sometime around 11 pm, but I only had 4 more seams to sew so I decided it wasn't my bedtime yet.

Check out the cheater pieced border.  Instead of making pieced border strips to add the start points into the border and adding that to the sides, I added the segments to the rows/sections and the border just happened as I sewed my rows together.  Happiness is also fewer border strips!

I'm going to send the pattern to testers this week and try to quilt the quilt while they test so I will have a pattern cover ready when testing and editing is finished.

I will try not to get side tracked with the next new starry quilt spinning around in my head.  That one has a more modern vibe and...wait, that's another quilt and another post!