Prescription: Orange Peels

Well, I don't tons of fun quilty updates to share with you today. But I do have a photo from of this week's work in progress!

Confession time: I've been sewing while on drugs.  Fortunately mine would be of the lightweight prescription painkiller variety.  In my defense,  the Rx says I shouldn't drive or operate heavy machinery, but it said nothing about operating a sewing machine!

Anyway, the meds are working well, and I'm bouncing back quickly from my minor surgery.  But the drugs do make me a little drowsy and unfocused, so when I got a creative itch, I needed a simple repetitive block to work on.

Enter, orange peels.

I'm seriously in LOVE with these orange peel quilts, both feature scrappy low volume backgrounds and fun bright peels: Emily's Rainbow Orange Peels and Jessica's Scatter Quilt. I just saw that Jessica lives and quilts not to far from where I grew up, in NJ. She doesn't know it yet, but I am pretty sure we need to be best friends. Just sayin'.

I'm using the fusible interfacing technique from this tutorial by Emily.

Apologies for the slightly unfocused fuzzy cell phone photos. Let's go ahead and call that an intentional sneak peek into my foggy state of mind. 

So, the bad news is I technically started a new project but the good news is that it's scrap friendly, there's no deadline and I don't have to worry about messing up if I'm a little loopy.

Let's call this one a win.

Linking up:

Romeo, oh Romeo!

Have you ever had an idea, and jumped in head first with no solid plan?

That kind of happened with this quilt, and somehow it all worked out.

Our wonderful volunteers pieced 14 quilt tops at the inaugural Caring Star Quilts sewing day this spring. 

It was a truly inspiring day (read more here). 

There were a few more quilt tops that needed to be sewn after the fact, so a few core volunteers started work on additional tops before the big presentation to our local ill, injured and wounded veterans. 

I was one of them, and I knew right away that I wanted to play off of the improv squares we had placed into the border of the Team Juliet quilt.

I gathered up scraps from the sewing day and got additional scraps, large and small, from the project coordinator, Meg. 
The plan (if you could call it that) was to make improv pieced blocks and to ‘float’ them on the background.

So I started with these, and just kind of kept going. 

And I kept going.

And then I did some math. Kind of….

Just enough to make sure the final quilt was close to the required 60" x 70" dimension for Caring Star Quilts.

Okay, I really didnt do any math. Basically, I moved my design wall boards to the floor. It was a highly technical, advanced approach, that went something like this:

1. Lay design boards on floor.
2. Measure.
3. Cover ‘extra’ design board with the first blanket I could lay my hands on.
4. Grab blocks, toss on floor.
5. Stand back, squint, rearrange. Repeat.

I cut the background fabric, trimmed it down and squared as I went.
Here you can see (if you look carefully) that the white background is growing!

By the third photo there, my energy was low, it was late, I had no daylight, and the growing top was getting more and more difficult to wrestle under my machine.

I started to get cranky…. not gonna lie. Hubby asked if I was alright, and I responded that the quilt and I were having some growing pains. In that moment, I realized that the counterpart, to Juliet, was Romeo.

Finally, miraculously, I fudged seams and straight lines until all of it was pieced.

And I handed Romeo off to get quilted. 

I may be partial, but I think Romeo is a handsome fellow. Just look at the quilting! The volunteer who long-armed Romeo, chose just the right modern grid pattern to accentuate his wonky square awesomeness. 

Despite the growing pains and tight deadline I am so happy with how this quilt came out. It is made (with the exception of the Kona Snow yardage background) entirely from scraps. 
The scraps are the not quite big enough, not quite square enough, not quite right cast-off scraps that would otherwise be considered trash, or waste.

I may be over analyzing here, but consider that the motivation behind this project is to bring comfort and love to wounded ill injured, and to their caregivers. To bring hope and support to the unsung heroes who care for our veterans who feel broken, and maybe even a little cast-off.  There is a strong symbolism to turning these ‘scraps’ into something unique, and beautiful.

I can’t say that I’d make this quilt again.

Another improv quilt? Absolutely, but another one just like this? Nope.

It is a one-of-a-kind. There won’t be another in the world like it, one that has been touched by so many people who care, and gifted to one who is so deserving of their support.

Once again I am honored to be part of the caring Star Quilts volunteers.

So, Romeo, even though we only spent a short time together, you will always hold a very special place in my heart.