TGIFF - Scraps Take Flight

Welcome to TGIFF, the party where we celebrate our finishes 😊 Before I share my finish, did you know my third annual WIPS-B-GONE challenge has started? If you have an abundance of projects waiting to be finished, this challenge is for you! For the months of October and November, we're focusing on finishing up WIPs so we can use them, display them, gift them, or donate them. Anything is better than just stuffing those WIPs in a closet and feeling bad that they're not finished, right? It's not too late to get started, so if you want in, click here to join the challenge.

And now my finish...which was actually finished back in July, and this post was started in August, and now I'm finally getting around to finishing it 😅 This is Scraps Take Flight, and I love this quilt! I love the scrappiness of it, especially combined with the abundant negative space that lets each butterfly stand out. Scraps Take Flight was the Stash Artists pattern for July, and I'm glad to share it here. Better late than never, right? FYI, Stash Artists will be opening for new members next month, so join the waitlist to be notified when the doors are open.

Knowing I was planning to make this quilt, I had several fabric cutting sessions with the childcare littles last winter and spring. They love using the Accuquilt Go machine to cut squares from my scraps! That meant I had a big bag of squares already cut when I was ready to make sets, and it was so satisfying to dig through the pile to find 6 colour matching squares for each butterfly.

Of course, the littles and I had so much fun cutting squares, I still have a big bag of them for some future project!

I used four different grey fabrics for the butterfly bodies, and stitched around all of them with Aurifil 2610.

QuiltCon 2024 will have a special exhibit of scrappy quilts, and one of the requirements is the quilt top has to include at least 30 different fabrics. This quilt meets that requirement in one row of blocks!

I usually choose solids for my backings, but the owner of my LQS is planning to retire at the end of the year, so she's not restocking anything, and her selection of solids was looking pretty bland by the time I dropped in looking for a back for Scraps Take Flight. There was nothing nearly as nice as this colour in a solid. And of course, I hadn't thought ahead enough to have ordered anything. Typical! I'm definitely going to have to learn to plan better for backings and backgrounds, since I won't have her shop to drop into whenever I want. It has only ever been a teeny little shop in her basement, but she kept a good selection of solids and blenders up until recently. 

I knew all along that I wanted to quilt this double loop design (I love when a quilting design raises its hand like that, saying, "Pick me, pick me!"), and white Aurifil was an easy choice for the thread. I didn't want the quilting to add colour to the background, and while the white stands out on all the scrappy fabrics, it's not distracting.

Scrappy binding was another easy choice.

While assembling the quilt top, I was careful to keep the butterflies right side up (the difference is subtle, but the body is slightly longer at the bottom), but then when I put the label on, I completely forgot about that. Of course, because I wasn't paying attention, I put it on one of the top corners! No big deal, except when I took a picture of the quilt on my design wall for the pattern cover, I used the label to indicate which way to hang it. I didn't realize the mistake until I was editing the picture and something looked a bit off. Thank goodness I intended for that picture to be cropped in close, with just the design wall as the background, so I could just flip it over in the photo editor without it looking weird. That wouldn't have worked so well with the beach pictures! I had to be careful to remember to keep the label at the top when Nathan and Zachary were holding it for me.

That was actually my second photo shoot with Scraps Take Flight. The first one was...less than successful. It was a beautiful summer afternoon and the lupines were blooming. I wanted to get a picture of the quilt in a field of lupines, so I headed out with my photo stand to the vacant lot beside the Catholic church. When I arrived, there were a couple of cars parked in front of the church, which I thought was unusual since it was a Tuesday afternoon, but I didn't think much of it. I set up the photo stand in the lupines, got the quilt hung up and then raised it up so the quilt was off the ground.

I took a couple of pictures...

...and then the wind knocked the whole thing over into the flowers. Sigh. I wrestled it back up as more and more cars were parking in the church parking lot, and starting to park in the vacant lot, too. I took another picture...and the wind knocked it over again. That was when I realized everyone was coming to the church for a funeral. Between that and the wind, I decided it would be a good idea to pack up and go home.

After I took the quilt off the stand, I noticed little green flecks all over the front of the quilt from its faceplants into the lupines, and swiped my hand over a couple to brush them off, only to discover they were sticky and smeared across the quilt. Across the white background 😫 I wanted to cry!

Back home, I carefully dabbed at the many, many flecks with the sticky side of some masking tape to remove them, hoping not to smear more of them, but it didn't work. By the time I had removed them, the whole front of the quilt looked like this...

I figured washing the quilt couldn't possibly make it worse, and might just help, so into the washer it went. As soon as the washer stopped, I checked and most of the flecks were gone, but not all of them, and some of the blue dye from one of the fabrics had run into the white. I was so frustrated by then, that I just shook my head and put it back in for another wash. I wasn't feeling much hope, so I was thrilled when I took it out after the second wash to find the flecks were all gone and the blue dye was gone, too!

One Stash Artists member has already shared her baby size quilt top made with the Scraps Take Flight pattern. It looks so different from mine! Why is it so fun to see someone else's scraps combined into a quilt? Maybe because there's such variety in their scraps, so many fabrics that I don't have, and it's interesting to see how they combine them? I'm not sure what it is, but I love it!

Now it's your turn! What have you finally finished? Or finally got around to sharing, even though it was finished a while ago? Link it up below so we can celebrate with you, and be sure to visit some of the other links, too.

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