Guatemalan Flora Row Quilt

I know, I know, I promised a long time ago to update more, and well, after getting let go from my job (not at the shop)...let's just say that just because you're technically unemployed it doesn't mean you aren't crazy busy! I wish I could say I had more time now than ever to sew, but sadly, that's simply not the truth. I've gotten a few projects done (or mostly done) and this is one of them.

Guatemalan Flora is a line of fabric from Robert Kaufman, and yeah, it's about a year and a half old...about as old as this sample is. It got pushed, as many do, to the back, back, back, waaaaaaaaay back burner as more urgent projects took the lead and this one sat and figuratively molded on my UFO shelf. Okay, who am I kidding? I have a complete set of shelves dedicated to UFOs. I wish I were kidding....I'm not.

But back to the quilt! This fabric came with a lot of great, large scale graphic florals and stripes, but the fabric I chose was a large border stripe with lots of littler rows with the larger ones. A lot of times we see these big stripes and think, "Well, this is only good for a border really," and we get stuck in a borders rut. But these large border stripes can be fussy cut into blocks, or a length of yardage to make into a row quilt, which I chose to do. Row quilts get scoffed at quite a bit simply because of their simplicity, and I don't think that's quite right. Even though they're about as simple as you can get, they can have a real impact and they don't have to just stay in long rows either! I cut mine apart and put large strips in between to break it up. But it made a large quilt very quickly and after it sitting on that shelf for months and months, it was totally pieced and ready for the quilter in an afternoon.

 I interuppted the stripe pieces with coordinating fabrics from my stash to get it to the size I wanted, since using only the rearranged stripe pieces it fell a little short.

 Here you can see the scale. In the upper left corner is my wastepaper basket and the right, my dresser. It's pretty large!

Now it's quilted and I thought I took a picture of the quilting, but I apparently didn't, so I'll have to update with a picture of the new quilting. Frances used a fantastic floral pattern and a really gorgeous variegated thread. All it needs now is the binding!