A Finished Scrappy Trip-Around-the-World Quilt!

Someone cue the marching band: another UFO (unfinished object)  is complete. Behold the the long-time-WIP (work in progress) Scrappy-Trip-along is finished!

This quilt was started over two years ago. I finally got serious about finishing it this past January when I became determined to start tracking and finishing all those (many, many…many) WIPS.

This is such a fun project – a great way to use up 2 1/2″ wide scraps or to just bust through a lot of fabric stash. Bonnie Hunter wrote the original tutorial for this quilt  and can be found here on her blog. I used red  in every block and made it my center color to give the quilt some unifying design.

One of the reasons I put this WIP away for a while is because the colors weren’t working for me. I just didn’t love it. The trick that gave this quilt new life was adding more non-matchy-matchy fabrics. Some more turquoise, different shades of red for the main diagonals, more ‘sour’ colors including gold, darker shades of green, etc. all made a difference. Picking a “zinger fabric” (or two or three or ten, when it’s this scrappy) can give some great life to a quilt.

Since I wanted this to have an old-fashioned, rag-bag, kind-of-look, I had Melissa from Sew Shabby Quilting quilt it with an all-over Baptist Fan design. I love how much it really pops after I washed the quilt.

The binding is also from my stash (*pats self on the back*). I love this bias stripe print. It’s also a couple years old from a Moda collection called Baby Jane. I was originally going to do a red binding, but it making myself stay away from the matchy-matchy-ness I decided to go with mustard/gold. The white stripes kind of lighten it up a lot which gives it a more subtle finish. I think I like it.

I’ve been saving this yardage for a while now to back just the right quilt. This is that quilt. This fabric is an American Jane print by Sandy Klop for Moda from a few years back. I have a fun personal connection to this print (you can read here), so it’s fun to finally have it on a quilt. I used a few scraps in the quilt blocks too.

I didn’t have quite enough yardage, so I had to piece a back to expand it just a little. Which is hard to really see here since we weren’t getting many great pictures thanks to the wind.

Here’s another “good effort” try at getting a full-body shot of the quilt.

Further proof that the wind had a mind of it’s own.

Which just devolved into to this. I shared a few more outtakes last night on Instagram. (And that is how I learned about the #husbandsholdingquilts hashtag there. It is quite hilarious.) What would we do without our quilt holders?

    Fortunately the wind granted us one decent full shot. And there you go.