Chinese Coins Strip Quilt

My friend Kim does wonderful things with colour.  When she brought this little top to show-and-tell I fell in love with it.  I just might have put it into my bag at the end of the session and brought it home with me because Kim has a reputation as a serial "topper" and I couldn't bear the thought of this piece languishing in a trunk.   And it just might have been languishing in my sewing room for quite a while (I looked it up -- we were working on strippy quilts four years ago.)

I rediscovered it the other day and put it on the quilting machine. I have been quilting edge-to-edge designs on "quick quilts" recently so I changed the pace a bit and indulged in some more complex designs on this one.  I love the way the feather quilting curls through the pieced strips.

This quilt needs to find its way home to Kim soon, but I'm going to leave it on the living room floor where it catches the light just right for just a few more days.

Back to the never-ending scraps

This is what is on my wall today:

Auditioning units to make Woodland Clover blocks.

The pattern is based on the cover quilt from Pat Speth's More Nickel Quilts book.

I say "based on" because would I follow the author's instructions and start with a nice pile of neat 5" squares?  Of course not! Instead I dived into scrap bins and pulled out strips and odd bits of various sizes.  Surely this will be the quilt that finally uses up all those pieces!

When all the cutting was done I had enough pieces to make 20 blocks -- enough for a small quilt that will be donated to a Good Cause.  (The cutting took a long time because there was all that finding and measuring and trimming that wouldn't have been necessary if I'd started with squares.)

This is what a stack of pieces for 20 blocks looks like.
 This may not make a discernible impact on the scrap pile!

As I was pressing my units I noticed this:

Some of these patches have been around the block a few times already -- can you see the tell-tale creases that show seams have been unpicked?

Makes me wonder how many times I will re-use a piece before it is finally gone!

One of these days I might actually go the Main Stash and start with larger pieces of fabric, but at the moment I'm having too much fun in the scrap heap.