The Phoebe Quilt

We had another round of snow last night, another 6 inches or so, and just a few days after the last round. Because the temps have been so cold, nothing has melted; so we probably have a foot of snow on the ground now. Too bad it came so late in the winter before the ground froze because without that insulating layer of snow, we think the line coming off our septic tank at camp froze and split. Water ran down the hill under the sheds and froze, so the entire shed is now sitting on ice. Nothing to do about it now, but no idea what that will look like in the spring, but we'll get it fixed. More snow next week. Oh good. 

These are my sedums in the header photo, which we never cut down in the fall. I love how they look with the snow piled on top.

I spent all morning watching James Bond movies and finishing the Phoebe quilt. It finishes at 60 x 80. I intended to donate it; but hubby liked it, and I thought he wanted to keep it--until he saw a four patch quilt I started with the scraps from this one. Look! Over there! So easily distracted, lol. So this one will in fact go to Maine Veterans.

There isn't much blue in the quilt, so I used up another piece of blue fabric languishing in the stash for the binding. I also didn't have thread to match, so I used a variegated thread with that color blue in it, and I quite like the way that looks. Never occurred to me to do that before, but I'll definitely be using more variegated thread for bindings in the future. 

The backing fabrics were maybe 3-yard pieces that I've been wanting to think of a way to use for a long time. Truthfully, I don't know why they appealed to me. Maybe because they were a good buy at Mardens, lol. In any case, the middle piece is now out of the stash. More and more I'm liking the strip pieced backings on scrap quilts, an idea from Bonnie Hunter's blog. Great way to use up some stash.

This neutral strings quilt is the next one to get prepped for the longarm. When my friend passed away in 2017, I inherited 48 of these 4-inch string units.  

I had no idea what her plan was for these, and I didn't know what to do with them either because they're very busy. I finally decided to just sew them all together, and I really like the result. These are made of those low volume prints that are too busy for a low volume quilt, but they're perfect for this. 

The blocks came with a huge bag of strings in these mostly tan colors. Koleen loved those colors, but I much prefer whites and creams, so it took that much longer to figure out what to do with them. I needed another 72 units to bring the quilt up to the size I wanted, so I worked out of her bag of strings, and they blend well. That bag is so stuffed with strings that you'd never know I took anything out of it, lol, isn't that the way? The quilt is now 40 x 48, which will fit on the wall in my bedroom perfectly. 

Linking up with Oh Scrap!