Blogger's Quilt Festival - Shiplapped

I worked on this all weekend to squeeze it into the Blogger's Quilt Festival before the deadline.  Whew! I made it!

A few years ago I bought a kite ruler that could be used to create equilateral triangles.  At that time I had also collected a bunch of scrap strings.  I decided I wanted to make a quilt with triangle string blocks.  Soon after I started making my 6" string blocks I discovered selvedge quilts, and the remaining blocks primarily consisted of selvedge strings.  Every time I finished a quilting project, I'd make several more triangles (and some crumb hexies that were also inspired from the same ruler).




It took three years to make enough triangles to put into a quilt.  I had made the blocks without any quilt in mind.  About two years into it, I saw this quilt, and decided that's what I wanted to make, or something close to it.  I counted my blocks and was still about 30 blocks short for the size I wanted.  Well, somewhere I mismeasured or miscounted - when I started to lay out the final quilt, I had either way more blocks than I needed for a throw quilt (which had been the plan) or somewhat short to make a twin sized quilt.  I tried a few designs by removing the sashes, and eventually went with what I called a zig-zag design.

As I assembled the quilt, it reminded me of fish scales or shiplapped boards.  I flipped the quilt upside-down from how I originally laid it out (because that felt more shiplapped) and named it such.  I had wanted to free motion quilt it, but that went wrong very quickly.  So I decided to straight-line quilt it with interlocking diamonds and triangles which happened to go better with its name.

I normally take photos on a sunny day so the quilting will pop.  Well... it was cloudy today, so I had to make due.  The quilting doesn't show much on the front, which is fine - it's already so busy.  But the back echoes the shiplap theme.

I liked the diamonds on the top and bottom and didn't want to cut them off to square the quilt.  That made binding it somewhat challenging.  I should have researched before I started binding.  I had way too much bulk in the inside corners.  I had to rip it out, trim out the excess length and put the binding back together.  I hate attaching the beginning and ends of a length of binding, and I ended up doing it three times on this quilt.  Ugh!  Although I'm annoyed at the extra seams in the binding, it looks great.  I'm happy I took the time to pull it apart and do it right.

At 71.5" x 45.5" - Shiplapped is tall and skinny.  It's an odd shape for a throw quilt.  I tried a couple of different layouts, but this was my favorite no matter what I tried.  Turns out it's a great length to turn sideways and throw over your shoulders.  See?  Perfect for snuggling with.  It's heavy, too, since the strings on each triangle were sewn onto a fabric base.

It's been fun to review the quilts I've made over the last few years.  There's a few fabrics going all the way back to curtains from my first apartment, a duvet cover from my sister, and a few baby quilts.  At least 25 years of of snips and scraps are in this quilt.



The scrappy theme continued with the back and the quilting.  The backing was a mix of favorite scraps and a few fat quarters that never quite went with anything.  I used up a couple spools of variegated thread that I couldn't find a good project for.  Perfect!

This was a fun learning project, since I've never done triangles before.  Good practice for straight line quilting.  Learned a lot about binding inside corners.

Be sure to check out all the wonderful quilts over at the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  Entry deadline may be today but the quilts are out there for everyone to enjoy.

Sharing with Freemotion by the River's Linky Tuesday.