Blogger's Quilt Festival: Improv ABC

It's Bloggers Quilt Festival time again!  (If you don't know what I'm talking about - check out this link HERE.)

I have two recent finishes to share with you this time around.  They are very similar, and yet very different.  I'm excited to show them to you.  You can see my other quilt HERE.

 So.  A little bit of backstory.  Every quarter or so, the Nebo Modern Quilt Guild issues a challenge to its members.  Our most recent challenge was to make letters or words out of fabric.

 A few days after the announcement was made, I saw a DARLING post on IG (this one, right here - by Quiltingmod).  She had the awesome idea to make an ABC quilt using novelty fabrics - each letter represented by something that starts with that letter.

 If you know me at all you might know that I sort of LOVE I-Spy quilts (check out this one HERE).  WHY DID I NEVER THINK TO MAKE ONE LIKE THIS???  I was instantly inspired.

At our next guild meeting, one of our lovely and amazing board members gave a presentation on how to make letters - improv style.  Good, good.

 And then a few days later I was the lucky winner of a giveaway on IG (from the amazing Sweetfeetstitches) - a whole pouch STUFFED with novelty scraps. 

Obviously I was meant to make this quilt.  I had a TON of fun picking out fabrics for each letter and then making each block up as I went along.  (Don't you just love those toasters?)  Let me just say - I learned a TON about improv piecing while making this quilt.  Who knew uppercase Ys were so hard to make?  (Hence the lowercase y in my quilt... And thanks Sonia for helping me figure out which fabric to use for that elusive letter y.)

I was originally planning to sash these blocks so they could float on their own, but when it came time to assemble them, they wanted to be smashed together.  So I smashed them all together and I think it turned out pretty cool.  The bottom row was struggling a bit, so I made an exclamation point (from a text print! - thanks to Natalie for the idea) to go with it.  In case you couldn't tell what that was (the dot got chopped off in the quilt trimming process).

As for quilting, I knew all along that this quilt wanted to be quilted with straight lines.  And that it wanted to be bound with the same grunge fabric I used for the background.

 Unfortunately, I didn't have enough grunge leftover for the binding, so I used this cream texty print instead.  It's pretty close.  :)

Even the backing has letters on it.  This Scoot fabric has been in my stash forever.

Wouldn't this quilt look amazing hanging on a wall in a nursery somewhere?  (Obviously my wall isn't big enough, sigh).

 I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with this in the long run, so I'm listing it in my Etsy shop to see if anyone bites.  :)  (Check it out HERE.)

Quilt stats:

Started: June 2016

Finished: September 2016

Fabrics: novelty scraps, moda grunge in cream

Batting: Pellon 100% Cotton

Finished size: Approximately 42" x 42"

Recipient: ???

Methods used:  Improv Piecing, Straight Line Quilting

Binding: Hand Stitched to the Back

Time to make:  Roughly 13.5 Hours

This quilt could fit into so many categories, but I decided to enter it in the Modern Quilts category of the Blogger's Quilt Festival.   You can see all the modern quilts HERE.  Check out all the quilt categories HERE.

This quilt is also #3 on my Finish Along list for this quarter.  Wahoo!  When the time comes, I'll be linking up here: