…wip wednesday – stash-busting triangle quilt…

There is a certain madness to the creativity inspired by a ridiculously full craft room, that really needs reorganising (again), and a good clean out (again). Last year, I started a 100 days project, but scanning around my craft room, I had lots of unfinished projects that for various reasons wouldn’t work, and lots of little bits and pieces of things that kind of tickled my fancy but weren’t enough to sustain 100 days of creating. I ummed and ahhed and as I starting packing stuff away and almost as quickly, giving up on it (again), inspiration struck – I could combine both the challenge and my too-full craft room, and so I ended up deciding for 100 days, I would craft with, and use up, all the little odds and ends in my stash that are either almost finished and just hanging around, or have been in my stash for “one day”… 100 days of Use It Or Lose It.

I shared along the way on Instagram, using the tag #barefoot100days, and actually made it through to day 55. Things kind of fell off the wagon there, as day 56 was farm handover day and I got busy spending most of my free time at our lovely little slice of peacefulness, instead of in my craft room. But 55 is better than nothing, and I felt much better for having done it and used some of these lovely supplies.

I have shared the socks I made with some leftover yarn, and for the longest time, I have been wanting to share with you. But various other things have made it to the blog instead, and originally I thought I would be able to actually get it finished in time to blog it just the once, and finished. Yes. I am that delusional. You can stop laughing now. With my craft room now more than half emptied, and a lot of my bulky quilting supplies packed into storage, it will be a while before I can get stuck into this properly and get it finished, but it’s too pretty to not share.

All the way back in 2012, a few of my crafty faves and I hit up Sydney for a weekend of shenanigans – where “shenanigans” means in your pjs by 5pm, crocheting and scoffing chocolate pretzels – and we happened to go out on excursion, as one does in the big smoke, to get some quality shopping in. One of our stops was to the now-defunct Calico and Ivy, where I kind of went a little nuts and bought all kinds of lovely goodies… including half a metre each of three very sweet fabrics, with the intention of making a quilt for Butterfly. Yah. What was I just saying about roads paved with good intentions?

With a good chunk of the challenge underway, and the easy things used up, I was starting to turn to my bigger items in stash, and after making myself an over-sized tote bag (which I have just realised I also didn’t share! Tell me again why I thought I didn’t have enough blog content to write in this space in the first half of last year?), I had established the momentum for sewing, and so, to my enablers went the message – “am I crazy to start another quilt?”. It was mere moments later the message came back “yes you are. Do it.” and just like that, I was down the new quilt rabbit hole. I was looking for something fun and reasonably quick to cut and sew together, and ended up deciding on just a basic triangle pattern. Except it very quickly became apparent I didn’t have as much fabric as I thought I did…There was no way I was going to be able to go anywhere close to even a bed-topper for a single bed. Part of the idea of the challenge was to use what I had and avoid buying extras, and so into the solids stash I went, and pulled out a grey and a pink that were kind of close enough, but then it was starting to feel quite heavy and dark, so I tried mixing in some cream.

Yep, much better. But, of course, still not enough!! Off to the fabric shop, then, I went, and while I didn’t find any pinks, or even any solids that matched what I had already cut, I did find a sweet pale grey print with a pattern that somewhat echoed the main print I was using. Bringing it home and cutting it up, it was the perfect addition.

I am super happy with how it came together. This quilt is destined to be a bed quilt for Miss 8, and I think it will work perfectly as an addition to her current fairy doona cover for now, and then as she moves into the tween years, it should work as a nice mix of cute girly and funky tween, as her main bed cover. If I manage to get it finished before she leaves home. That’s totally doable, right??