Rainbow Waves Finally Finished!

At long last the Rainbow Waves quilt that I've been showing you sneak peeks of is done! This quilt began as an attempt to use of scraps (of course). I cut as many 3.5" squares from my colored, prints scraps as I could, which eventually became (768) 3" HSTs.  I have made a traditional ocean waves quilt before and I love the block, but went looking for something a little different this time.  The design was borrowed from The Cre8tive Quilter's blog.  To see how the blocks come together go here. 

The quilt measure something like 75"x95", so I am calling it a full size.  It was already 60"x80" before I decided to add borders.  Don't ask me what I was thinking making a large, heavy, difficult to quilt top even bigger with borders. I suppose I was thinking that it was a way to cram more scraps into it.

I got into my strings bin and pulled everything that looked to be less than 1.5" wide.  I trimmed them to 3/4", 1", and 1.5" widths and pieced them end to end. Then I sewed the strings around and around and around the top to make the border.  The innermost round of the border is just a 1/4" wide.

Full disclosure: the corners did not lay remotely flat before washing.  All better now :)

I decided for simplicity's sake to just stipple the whole thing.  A wonderful friend modified my desk so that my machine bed sits level, which made this possible.  I actually stippled the borders first, then trimmed the sides and went ahead and bound it before stippling the body of the quilt. I figured I needed to lose every little bit of bulk I could before the real quilting began.

There are lots of fun favorite fabrics in this quilt. I snuck in a few patches of fabric from my alma mater.  Trimming my HSTs carefully made all the difference as far as matching up corners in this thing.  Not all the corners are perfect, not even close, but I'm really happy with how many of them are good.

Like all the best scrap quilts, it doesn't look like much up close but from a distance the design comes out.  It's kind of like an eye-spy looking in close. (I see a couple more A&M fabrics and part of a snowman in the section above.)

I used a cotton sheet with a cool pattern for the back and, of course, bound it in scraps. I had almost enough left over binding in solids to do the whole quilt but ended up having to throw in a couple of prints.  I keep my leftover bindings wound around each other like a jelly roll. This quilt took the diameter of my binding-roll from something like a dinner plate to just 4" across.

Delicious krinkle in the sunshine. I can hardly wait for winter again so I can put this on the bed! On and interesting note, it's always hard to guess how many yards of fabrics are sitting in our scraps bins. But, I used an equal amount of white fabric to prints in the HSTs for this and I know I went through at least 3 yards of white, probably more. So I pulled 3 yards of good fabric out of my scraps, and there's still plenty left!  Goes to show, there's more fabric left in scraps than you'd think.

Linking up to Finish it Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts and HSTeria at Vicki's blog.