HAZMAT quilt

Today I'm going to tell you a story about how this quilt was born. I just finished it at 2:00 today. It's still just a top, probably won't get quilted until next week ... maybe a little wishful thinking on my part.
It all started on day over 3 years ago ...
My friend Donna (my sewing buddy who moved away - but I am going to see her tomorrow!) had this great stash-buster idea. Let's randomly cut LOTS of strips from each of our stashes. Make 2 piles, share one and start sewing. Well, I would have done the "start sewing" part but Donna had already found several strippy patterns to choose from, so we each picked one and spent a delightful day sewing and cutting and sewing. Here's the quilt ... I call it Broken Crystals. There were MANY strips left and I put mine into a large Harley Davidson shopping bag.

A year goes by and now it's July 2008 and I've signed up for a class at Quilt Odyssey (which happens to be run/owned by Donna's sister, Missy), in Hershey, PA. I don't exactly remember the name of the class - something about strings, but Elsie Campbell was the teacher. The course description said ... bring lots of strips/strings. So I simply took my Harley Davidson bag of various sized strips and after a bit of a disasterous start ... really didn't like my original pieces, this is what I made ... A Diamond in the Rough. That's Elsie holding it with me. Elsie liked it so much she put it in her book, STRING QUILTS, (Yeah for me!) and for 2010, this quilt is on display at the People's Place Quilt Museum in Intercourse, PA (double Yeah for me!!)

Here's the back - I quilted it with my HQ Prostitcher.

Now fast forward to yesterday (2/2/10). I didn't exactly have a New Year's Resolution to clean up/clean out my studio but a LOT of quilters did. I've been reading about studio redo's and organization tips, etc. I even cleared off and cleaned up around my cutting table, but everything else is still a mess ... and I LOVE my mess. Any way ...

There on top of the red box (not sure what's in that) next to the basket (lots of ribbons), was the leftovers from my Broken Crystals quilt. the sign on the bin says: "strippy quilt w/ Donna 11/06).

And, I managed to fish around and find the original 12 blocks that I'd started with Elsie. The reason I didn't like them ... I thought they looked like HAZMAT signs ... not the look I was going for in that particular class.

And ... the Harley Davidson bag full of leftovers from the Diamond in the Rough quilt. Some of these chunks were pretty chopped up and some were pretty small. But ... it's a snow day and I'm staying in and sewing.

After a very productive morning ... The HAZMAT Quilt was born!

Now ... I have 2 (yes ... 2!) empty containers just waiting for some new projects to get started. And - the Harley Davidson bag? It was pretty beat up and one handle was torn off so I had to finally throw it away. I also threw away a small handful of scraps.

That's not quite the end of this story however ... I still have 6 pretty good sized blocks left from the Broken Crystals quilt. Hmmm - maybe we'll get another snow day.