Scrappy Shapes Quilt

Several years ago I made a quilted Christmas wall hanging. It's a big tree with pieced multicolored balls and a garland quilted into the tree (you can see a not-so-great picture of it here). Every year I hang it on the wall directly opposite the stairs that lead to the second story in our townhouse, which means that we walk by it a lot. This made Simon very happy because he LOVES this quilt. Every time we walked by it he would stop to point at all the ornaments and wait for us to name the colors. After about fifty times of doing this, I decided that Simon needed a quilt of his own to hang all year round.

I approached this project very differently than all my other projects. I had absolutely no plan when I started. I knew that I wanted a variety of appliquéd shapes, so I dove into the scrap bag and cut out a variety of shapes: circles, squares, rectangles, diamonds and ovals. I prepared the shapes to be appliquéd and then faced a dilemma: what was I going to do with them? I decided to sew them onto long neutral rectangles and then made some smaller blocks out of strips from the scrap bag. I laid them out and quickly found that the quilt was way too skinny, so I padded it up by adding some purple sashing. Then I added a green border and quilted it all up with a meandering stitch - after so much creativity and spontaneity I just couldn't think of something equally creative to do with the quilting.

After hand-sewing the binding, I threw it in the washer with some Woolite only to discover this disaster:


That is the pink from the backing fabric bleeding through onto the border. I always prewash all of my fabric and this time was no exception. What, I ask, is the point of all that prewashing if it's just going to bleed anyway?? This weekend begins the search for Synthrapol and then fervent prayers that it actually works.