Kickin' up my heels at the Festival of Scrappiness

I came across Stitched In Color's blog last week, and I am so happy I did. Not only is it a fun place to visit, but I was just in time to plan my entry for her Festival of Scrappiness (and how "me" is that name?) today through Wednesday. It's a fun linky party where you can enter any scrap quilt you have completed in 2012.

Might I pause to mention that I love that by "completed", she means the top is done. A woman after my own heart. So given the fab linky party name and the flexible definition of done, I obviously had to participate.

You think you know what I am entering. You are only half right.

It's "Kickin' Leaves" - my second group quilt sample of Kickin' Stash, top completed last Thursday and until today unseen by almost everyone in the world. So now, direct to you from its recent engagement hanging off the side of my garage, I give you, "Kickin' Leaves".



This quilt was the second of the two group quilts I was able to make when I was inundated with volunteers to participate in my latest group project/block exchange. For more on that and where this quilt had its beginnings, you can read this post so that I don't send everyone who is painfully familiar with this project screaming from my blog, never to return.

I absolutely love this block and the resulting quilts I've made from it (three so far this calendar year!) because it is a scrap buster of immense proportions. The fabric requirements for each block are so minimal that if you have a 6" x 10"ish piece of fabric, you've already got 1/4 of the block taken care of. The widest of the pieces are only 2 1/2" wide, too, and what does that mean? Even the leftovers from jelly rolls are perfect for this block. Which all means that other than background fabric, you most likely have all the fabric you need and then some to make way too many of these blocks already in your sewing studio.

Suffice it to say that the inundation of block sewing volunteers for my project and their enthusiasm for block making lead to owning way more blocks than I could use in one quilt, so lucky (greedy) me, I got TWO! We can also suffice it to say that this tidbit of incredibly poorly thought out direction-giving: "Any color family will do. Really, I cannot stress enough how little I care which color family you choose" led me to more than one fit of distress as I tried to organize the blocks into two attractive quilts. But I think I did pretty well. (The other group quilt, which is done, bound, and already on the pattern cover can be seen here), along with a bunch of blocks that were sent to me. Again, I don't want to bore anyone who has seen it a million times already!



I love the batik tan I used for the border and spacer blocks. It really sets off all the different creams in the backgrounds of the blocks, and is a great fallish blender color, too. The scraps for the border came from my own scrap stash, and I so love that when I showed it to some guild friends last week one of them gasped and said "Wow - all of the pieces in your border are the same size! I didn't think you ever did that!" Why yes, I don't normally, but now and then one has to prove that they do actually know how to follow a quilting rule or two.

The plan is to get "Kickin' Leaves" quilted at my guild retreat this weekend. But I'm fresh out of good ideas how to quilt the thing. So....got an idea? Please feel free to comment!

Another plan is to make a fourth KS quilt at the retreat, from all blues with a cream background, due to the fact that my blue bucket of scraps was threatening to come to life and smother us all in our sleep. Here's my pile of pieces, ready to go:



Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy the rest of the linky party! Always a great excuse to check out some beautiful quilts while getting nothing else done all day.