Fast, easy, and finished

Hi everyone, and welcome to another summer weekend!  They're slipping away really fast, aren't they?  I can't believe that on Sunday it will already be July.  July! I have too much left to do for it to be July already.  Something tells me that I may not get it all done.

Here's one thing I did get done-- this week I finished up this fun little quilt:

This is a simple 16-patch that I made from some Island Batik strips that I got for Mother's Day.  It was super-easy and went really fast.  And now it's all finished, including a binding, which is a semi-miracle.

For this quilt, I just took the two darker strips from one end of the set and matched them up with the two from the lighter end of the package, then made a strip set from those and kept going the same way until they were all used up.  I got 4 blocks from each strip set with only a small piece left over.  Sure, I could have stressed over matching up colors, but I'm proud to say that I didn't.  This method worked out pretty well.

With these strips I encountered something that I never came across before in precuts-- some of the strips were bowed at the center, which means that they made a "v" when opened up.  I was able to work around most of them, but there were two that were bad enough that I couldn't use them.  I substituted another piece from my stash and just threw out the bad ones. The rest of the fabric in the quilt top is just the strips from the package, which feels great to me.

The quilting here is just a simple cross hatch with the walking foot, which worked out really well.  I was able to get a lot of the quilt done without breaking thread by just pivoting and turning the quilt.  It finished at about 48 by 56, which is a decent lap size, and was small enough that I could maneuver it pretty well. 

The backing is just a piece of batik that I had in my stash for a long time.  I was so happy to use that up!  During the quilting, I kept checking the back to make sure there were no wrinkles.  The backing turned out completely flat except for one tiny tuck.  I planned to go back and fix that at the end, but after I finished all the rows I couldn't find the tuck any more.  Let's hear it for busy backings!

I made 40 blocks from the strips in the package, and then I had to make two more to fill out the layout.  I thought that I would just add in some pieces from the stash, but I was able to use the pieces leftover from the strip sets to make 2 multi-colored blocks.  (Look carefully and you'll find them.)  This means that all the fabric I have left from the quilt top is these pieces that were too narrow to use in the multicolor blocks:

That's a win for sure!  These will get cut up for scraps at some point.  Not sure what I'm going to do with the quilt itself.  I'm thinking of selling it.  I like it a lot, but I have so many that the house is slowly becoming a quilt storage facility.  I'll see if anyone in the family wants to claim it, then it just might be for sale.  Watch this space!

So there's my fast and easy finish! Sometimes it feels good to finish up something easy, you know?  Hope everyone has a lovely weekend.  Apparently, we are going to start a seven-day heat wave, which will include dangerous heat over 100 degrees (38C), so I'll try to stay inside and have some cool drinks.  Perhaps at a place where they show movies.  Sounds good to me!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Let's Bee Social.