Travel project

Tomorrow I am leaving for Malta. When I fly, usually I take my travel project with me. It’s a small bag of scraps, cut into 1.5” squares, thread, needle and a very small scissors:

I’ve never had any problem with security before, hope this will work this time again. Then when I wait for the flight, when I fly, and when I have nothing to do at the hotel or even on a beach I hand sew my squares together. Dark to the light, just two of them, then when I have bunch of these, I make 4 squares pieces, then 8, 16 and here I stop:

I cut more scraps into 1” squares and work until  I have enough of 16 square pieces to make all the 64 square blocks required for my quilt. This is because I want my fabrics in blocks to be mixed really well and not repeated  in the same block. This is how they look like:

               My latest travel project took me about 8 months to make.

Actually after I make enough of checkered blocks, it becomes a TV project. That means I only work on it when I sat down in the evening to watch TV. Because after making checkered blocks, I have to make hand appliqued blocks that I mostly use scraps too:

    

Then I need to make borders:

And finally I hand quilt it:

The only machine sewing is adding red sashes and binding. Still it is hand sewn on the back.

And finally I it’s finished!

Of course, it was carefully checked and approved by my daughter’s cat Smilga:

Starting 2013 I made three of these quilts, one of 49 blocks and two of 72 blocks. Tomorrow I will start one more but this time I am going to use a black background. I guess it will be much harder on my eyes to work on it.

Wish me luck on the flight and come back to see the result!