More on "One Big Finish"

Last week I wrote about this whopper of a quilt! A king with a little extra drop on the sides because I almost could. Almost--meaning I really couldn't but I tried anyway and then improvised.

I decided that we needed a new quilt for our bed since the bed is new, the floor and paint are new, and well, almost everything thing else is new. Why not the quilt, right? But the bed is a king and I've made only one of those before. 

After thinking about it quite a long time, I decided that I should go with something easy and settled on wide strips. Every piece is a chance to make a bad cut, sew an off seam, turn things around, etc. The smaller the pieces, the greater the chances of making an oops! 

The real fun came after I loaded it on the long-arm. There was room to play, experiment, learn, and surprise myself. That happened a couple of times and was wonderful every time. All along I'd planned to quilt it using as many motifs as I could come up with. I also wanted to play around and figure out a few new ones. 

Now I have a record of motifs that I know I like and a few I'm not crazy about. These pictures don't include them all but most are here. My very favorite one is this set of five interlocking circles with feathers and lotus flowers. It was rather serendipitous to start with one circle and some feathers and, in no time at all, have a couple more that looked pretty cool. So for the heck of it, I chose to have five.

One other thing that I like about this quilt is that every inch of fabric and batting came from my stash, so all it cost me was my time. And I love it!