SCRAP-tastic! Project Quilting 9.6

This week was the last challenge for Project Quilting Season 9 and the theme for the week was Scraptastic. Our quilts this week were to be made entirely of scraps and were to have at least 12 different fabrics.

I was visiting our oldest daughter and her family in North Dakota over the weekend when the last challenge winners were announced and traveling home when the new challenge came out. So I didn't get a chance to watch the winners video and check out what we were going to be doing this week until Monday morning!

I was very excited to see that my little mice from the last challenge were in the top 10 viewers choice  quilts.
Thank you to everyone that has voted for me this season :) I really appreciate your votes and all of your comments. This is the last challenge I will hound you for votes until next year!

On Monday I was still tired after a whirlwind weekend and over 800 miles of driving from here to there! When I left on Friday it was an ugly snowstorm, and the roads were starting to drift. I needed to drop something off at a friends house north of town so I knew I had to drive at least that far before I turned around and went home, but when I turned north the roads were better and by the time I crossed the Cheyenne River the snow had slowed and the roads were clear. So I kept going! By the time I crossed the ND border the sun was out & we drove in clear skies the rest of the way!

I  had gone up to watch our oldest grand-daughter skate in her annual figure skating program, and to help her create an Annie Oakley costume for her upcoming history class Living Wax Museum at school. I picked up a yard of flannel & some trim along the way north and with some creative ingenuity, a few more scraps from my daughters fabric stash, a cowboy hat and a pair of gloves we put together a pretty authentic Annie Oakley outfit! It was a good weekend & the weather cooperated until after I got home.

Monday was a crazy busy day, and I really didn't give the challenge a lot of thought. I knew I wanted to do something similar to the yellow challenge and sew strips of fabric together to create something. I thought about doing a birch tree quilt, but after doing nothing on Tuesday related to the challenge, I thought I better scale my idea down.

 I kept thinking about the 12 different fabric scraps we were to use, and I thought it would be fun to make something relating to the 12 months of the year. When we did the yellow challenge I kept thinking about candles, and I decided that I would do candles to represent the months of the year and then write family birthdays on each candle. On Wednesday while I was digging for scraps I came across some old taffeta, satin, velvet, and dress lining fabric that I had saved from the "Great Stash Purchase of 2010". For some unknown reason I thought this fabric would make great candles, maybe because it was shades of pink?

I love little pink striped birthday candles and these pinks, grays and ivory fabrics were just perfect...until I started sewing them. They frayed, they were stiff, the velvet kept crumbling, I almost SCRAPED the SCRAPS but since I had a vision and didn't want to dig for different fabric, I was determined to "make it work".

I found a fun piece of fabric left from a flower girls dress I had made a few years ago and decided that I would use that to make a cake for the candles. Then I took a scrap of ombre' fabric left from a baby quilt I made last year and cut strips to create the background for my candles. By this time I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to paint any names or dates on my satin & taffeta candles so I made my background long with the idea that I would paint the names above the candles.

I added flames to the candles using a scrap of yellow batik and then I set the whole thing aside until I could decide what I was going to do next!

Saturday morning I realized that the days might be longer but the week wasn't going to be, and if I was going to have something to enter this week I had better get it quilted. I had just taken a quilt off the longarm machine next door  and decided that quilting it that way was going to be faster than using my sewing machine and I would be able to write the names and dates in thread and I wouldn't have to mess with painting them on.

I dug through my stash and found a piece of fabric that had envelopes on it, which made me think of birthday cards and I used that for my backing fabric. I added an extra piece of batting to the birthday cake so that it would stand out more and then I started quilting! I had tension problems when I changed bobbins and had to pick out one name, then I only misspelled one of the months and put the wrong date on one birthday so I only had those 3 mistakes I had to redo. Which is a miracle since I really couldn't see what I was doing very well in the oranger parts of the fabric!

I quilted the candle flames, our family names, birth dates and the months of the year, in a bright orange thread, then quilted details on the candles in pink and a dark grey for the wicks. Then forgetting that the satin fabric was NOT fun to work with, I decided to bind the whole thing with a piece of pink satin & added a decorative stitch to hide the fact that it was a mess!

ugh....I should have tossed the whole pile of scraps away, but instead I tucked it into a drawer for the next time I decided I want to drive myself crazy trying to quilt with slinky fabric!

The finished quilt is 10 X 25 inches. I keep looking at it and just have to say...what was I thinking? LOL