Seaside Stitches: Swap Soup

I seem to have settled into a new routine of quilting WIPs on Fridays. For the third Friday in a row, I have worked on a WIP. The border quilting took longer than I had planned so the quilt wasn't finished until today.

This quilt was named Swap Soup because it contains a hodge podge of swap blocks and fabrics. Kind of like stone soup, they seemed to take on more flavor when they came together.

Working out from the center, the 12 little paper pieced blocks were made over the course of three months in 2011 by the Teeny Weeny Paper Piecing bee, which is no longer active on Flickr. They were supposed to be 6" finished blocks, but not all were exactly the right size. I added borders to even everything out.

Here you can see the quilting on the 6" blocks and their borders. The next border row was cut from basket weave string blocks I made in a Bonnie Hunter class in April 2012.

For the next round (on the right below), I added the blocks from Crafty Blackbird's Siggy Swap in 2012. They were quilted with a leaf shape and a stitch-in-the-ditch vine to travel up the center of the rows. The next row is from a couple of rounds of the Mini Scrap Basket String block swap. I used an Angela Walters fill from one of her Craftsy classes to quilt them.

To the top and bottom, I added some blocks made from polka dot charms that I also got in a 2012 swap. They were a little long, so I chopped off the ends to fit.

I was so annoyed with the outer border that I almost chopped it right off! My shoulders were killing me by then and I was cranky. I was doubting the border fabric, the quilting pattern and the thread choice. With some encouragement from Instagram friends, I just kept stitching! I love that green binding.

For the back, I pieced together some yardage of Italian alphabet prints that had been in my stash since 2012. (Michale Miller Parole Italiano) Julia loved her Italian teachers, so we thought about making aprons for them. With all the excitement of senior year, that never happened.