Bloggers' Quilt Festival: Broken Windows

So the BQF totally snuck up on me this year. It was only a month or so after the last one that I fell off the internet and while I have been making and sewing, I was feeling like I didn't have anything I wanted to enter. However, there are a few things I haven't shared yet. Like this one...

As a mini with fabrics I would never choose, this piece was a little out of the box for me. And I dealt with it a little in the box, too.  At Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guid, we had a challenge to use a bag of someone else's scraps. I got Erin's and she actually enjoyed handing over the ugliest bag of scraps ever seen in Saskatoon.  She even taunted us as she threw the bag in the mix.  Fabrics? Not modern. Colours? Non-descript.  Size? Larger than your average scrap. Hmmm.... Workable?

I embraced the messy!  I started with the batik. Some folks love 'em, some hate 'em and I'm somewhere in the middle. I use them, sparingly, and not on their own.  But this one had nice little boxes in a regular pattern, like frames.  I freehanded some shapes,  stay-stitched the lines, trimmed the excess and folded the seam allowance back. Then I backed each opening with a little piece of one of the horrid little scraps, and reverse appliquéd it to the batik.

Then I quilted it within a sixteenth of an inch of its life.  I started with a neutral cream colour and decided it needed red!

The binding was made from another one of the scraps. I knew it was going to be difficult and there was no way I'd be able to hand-finish it with the density of quilting on the back - I even debated ways I could get a way with leaving unfinished.  Once it was trimmed, I felt I lost a lot of the rustic, broken quality I was getting so I recaptured it by attaching the binding to the back and stitching it down unevenly along the front.

This is the first quilt I've actually hung on my walls and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Title: Broken Windows
Size: 18x11"
Category:  Small quilts?
Pieced and Quilted by me.

Thanks so much to Amy and the sponsors, everyone who stops by, and everyone who shares their work with the rest of us to make this festival so much fun! Can't wait to see what everyone's been up to!