Wonderful Wednesday - UFO Club Finish

Welcome to another edition of Wonderful Wednesday!!  WAIT, what??  I missed Wednesday, AGAIN?!  Whatever...

This week, I am pleased to report a (Ravelry) UFO Club finish.  Dad's Ties for Molly is FINALLY a completed quilt.  Care to join me in a happy dance?  :o))

This project has been in process for WAY too long!!  What I hoped to finish by the end of last Summer ended up taking an entire YEAR to come together.  I started with a box of men's neck ties:

I drew out a bunch of designs, but nothing felt right:

I even enlisted a friend (Thanks, Helena!!) to help stitch up the block mock-ups of the various designs.  I can't seem to locate them, at the moment, nor can I find the photos.  :o((

Found them!!  They were tucked away on a shelf behind the sewing machine:

These were made from tiny off-cuts from a group quilt that my Weekly Quilt Group made as a Thank You for our host at retreat a few years ago.  The mini quilts will be used in a future project.

After talking/texting/emailing back and forth with Molly, it was determined that she wanted the largest tie design showing as possible.  Hmm...  What better way to showcase the most of each graphic than with the humble square - accompanied by light sashing and dark cornerstones:

It surprised me just how long it took to create each Disappearing Nine Patch blocks, as each piece had to oriented correctly:

Of course, when working with silk ties, it's not as simple as sewing the pieces together!  Each tie had to be disassembled and lined with fusible interfacing prior to being cut and sewn.

Eventually, all of the blocks were done.

Well, except for the one made from the fish tie:

A sew day at Needleb's cemented the layout:

Another brought the quilt top together:

Ultimately, the quilt was quilted and only the binding remained:

The binding.  Oh, the binding!  Two-color binding was a great design idea:

Implementing that idea was more of a challenge than anticipated:

A Sew Day with members of the Unskilled Quilt Guild last weekend was just what I needed in order to put the proverbial icing on the cake:

Well, done, but not!!

Because of poor planning, I had sewn the two colors of the binding BACKWARDS.  The narrow color should have been wide and the wide color should have been narrow.  That meant that I ended up having to sew the binding on the front and flip it to the back.

Exactly OPPOSITE of what I would normally do for machine binding a quilt.  No worries!  I could catch the missed bits with needle and thread.  Right?

Wrong.

I thought I would mend any missed places by hand, but the toile decorator print on the backing really didn't lend itself to being hand stitched.  It was too thick and needling was nearly impossible.  I decided to give it another go with the sewing machine:

D-O-N-E.  Done, done.  DONE!!!

All that remained was a bag of scraps and these:

Spoiler Alert...

For those of you asking about the fish...

I decided to include only the tail.  You can find it in the very center of the quilt.  Sneaky, huh?

Linking up with Cynthia for Oh Scrap! on Sunday.

Why?

Because fabric that used to be neck ties, but have magically been transformed into a quilt certainly MUST qualify.

If not, the binding surely will, as it was made from the leftovers of another quilt!

Until next time...
Color me happy!!!