Bloggers Quilt Festival Spring 2015 - Power Nap

Hello and welcome to another edition of the fabulous Blogger's Quilt Festival: the only quilt festival best enjoyed in PJ's and bare feet! I've been participating off and on in Amy's great festival for years and I always enjoy meeting new quilt bloggers and enjoying the work of old friends alike. 

This time I'm sharing my first ever QAYG (Quilt-As-You-Go) quilt, made with upcycled, worn out work shirts of my husband's along with some chambray, linen and a few yardage scraps. I'm entering it in the Scrappy Category. This quilt was gifted to a friend of ours on the occasion of his 50th birthday last month.

Most of the blocks were spiral quilted individually, then joined together into rows with narrow joining strips. The rows were then joined with wider sashing strips stuffed with a strip of batting and quilted with straight lines. Initially, I liked the idea of the red "power tie" in the centre of each improv pieced block, surrounded by shirt fabrics, so the quilt was going to be called Power Tie. Then I found out that our friend likes to take a brief nap every afternoon in his downtown office, so I renamed it Power Nap (plus, he's not a tie kinda guy anyway).

There's even a sleeve placket with button and a chest pocket left on and quilted over. 

 The quilt was started in a class with Marianne Haak at the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild last fall. Before the class, I precut all of the laundered shirts into strips of various widths. Each block began with a red square-ish shape in the middle area and was built out improvisationally. At one point, I made a very traditional style log cabin with light fabrics on one corner and darker fabrics on the other. When laying out all of the blocks, that one really stuck out, so I decided to make three more and put them in the corners. I like the resulting big blue circle effect!  Check out Marianne's blog for excellent tutorials if you would like to try this technique. It is a great way to create a big quilt, fully quilted, on a small domestic machine.

Thanks for stopping by. Be sure to check out the rest of the festival. You can really make someone's day by nominating a quilt for Viewers Choice sometime in the next week, then vote for your category favs when voting opens on May 22!