Lost My Marbles - A Finished Quilt

It all started with a Moda Marbles color card.

The card was from quite a few years back but I could never part with it because the color swatches were real fabric. I shared the beginnings of this project a couple of months ago here. I used every piece I could salvage from the card. I had enough to make 14 blocks and was determined to have a square quilt so two four patch blocks made from Bella solids filled in nicely.

Each little square finishes at 1 1/4 inches. Not counting the sashing, this quilt contains 904 pieces. That's a lot for a 46" square quilt. The quilting uses an Aurifil light gray 50 weight thread and starts with an off center X that is filled in with echo quilting. It was fast work and I like it because it doesn't take away from the tile looking mosaic mix of color and neutral.

The binding is a Kaffe Fassett print.

The backing is a Moda print from the Simply Color collection.

For now, this quilt is hanging on a big blank wall in my bedroom. I'm not sure where it's final place will be. It may go to work with me and hang in my office or it may stay part of the bedroom, which has yet to be properly painted and decorated. This quilt might be a good inspiration piece for the rest of the room. We will see.

Lost My Marbles - A Work In Progress

For five years, from 2007 to 2011, I owned a quilt shop. It was a dream come true for me and a great experience. One of the things I held on to after the shop closed were the color cards that were used to order basics, like Moda Marbles. Really, I only kept the color cards that had real fabric samples on them. I finally decided it was time to do something with them. They were great as a point of reference for a while but they were starting to get a little bit out of date.

First, I pulled every single sample off the Moda Marbles color card, more than 200 of them. Some were unusable because they had too much glue and paper that just wouldn't come off, but most of them were just right.

It was possible to cut a clean 1 3/4" square from each sample. It took a few sessions to get everything cut but it was a lot of fun to handle each and every color. I really had no idea what these would become.

I wanted to do something mosaic like and I had recently grabbed up a Bella solids gray fat quarter bundle from the Fat Quarter Shop, so that became the next step. I cut strips from the gray and paired them with the Moda Marbles.

I also paired the grays with each other and threw in some white that came with my gray fat quarters.

The two patches became four patches, and the four patches went for a whirl on the design wall.

None of the fancy mosaic ideas in my head were working out once laid out on the design wall so I simplified the whole idea and came up with this.

I'm loving the tile look and it has just the right pop of color. There is one white bella square in each of the bigger blocks. There are many more to stitch and all of the ones on the wall now are still in their four patch status. It will be interesting to see how accurate these turn out. I have not sewn with so many small squares before. This will be a true test of my quarter-inch seam allowance. I'm usually not great at naming quilts but this one just makes me laugh...Lost My Marbles. This is true on a few levels with this quilt.

Linking up with Lee's WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced.