Eclectic Garden

Ok, so the actual piecing on this was done... 2, maybe 3 months ago? But I was in an odd state of catch-up on my blog at the time, so I never actually remembered to blog it. If we can all forget Star Wars and pretend it is September 2011 for a moment, allow me to present... Eclectic Garden.

My mom is a big Jason Yenter fan, and I have to admit, she's turned me into one too. My local quilt shop had a kit for the purple colorway of his Eclectic Garden Project Sheet, and I don't know how many times I stopped to admire it, thinking I'd never done blocks that complex and it was probably all too much for me.

Then it went on 25% off sale. At first, I thought they'd sold out, and my heart sank. I loved that quilt! It was my fantasy project for the day when I was a better quilter. But after moping about the shop for a bit, I realized they hadn't sold out, they just had moved it to the back because they only had 2 left. Cue the kind of relief that leads to realization of attachment, followed by buying "for the future." I mean seriously: how can you resist this yummy fabric?

This was almost a year ago, I think, and right before my wedding,  when I wasn't sewing *anything* at all. At the time it was a fit of far-off insanity, but then I learned, as beginning quilters often do. I got proficient enough with the rotary cutter that cutting blocks from a limited amount of fabric wasn't predisposed to disaster, I did "Batik Beauty" so I learned to work with triangles and blocks on point, and I made Sunset Surprise, so the idea of a block that consisted of multiple seams wasn't nearly so scary to me. Then, in September, I had time in my quilting schedule, and got brave enough to cut the material out.

Then I made the blocks, which I apparently forgot to take photos of in my enthusiasm, until finally I had enough to make a quilt's worth, shown below.

Assembling this quilt was a beast due to all the blocks on point and the seams that had to line up (I should point out that this was the early side of my learning how to pin the corners of my blocks effectively, for better or worse, and this was the first time I determined the length of my sashing by measuring the center of the quilt and trimming it accordingly rather than just running a long strip of sashing along the outside of my quilt body and letting it fall where it may. It was a lot more work, but the quilt did turn out nicely as a result.

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I sent it to my pro quilter last October, but batting had to be ordered before she could complete it. I got it back in mid-December, just before I finished quilting Ready, Set, Snow. Eclectic Garden is ready to bind now, so that will be my next hand-stitching project.