the puzzle {finished quilt}

Hello, I hope you all had a lovely couple of days spent with friends and family. Our Christmas was wonderful, full of cooking, baking, eating, playing, resting, and general lazying around - my absolute favorite.

As you may have noticed, there was no sewing included in the activities of the last few days. I do, however, have a big finish to share with you today. I finished my Puzzle quilt a while back but since it was all dark, cold, and windy most of the days I was not able to get any decent pictures done until now.

 I must say, this quilt was really hard to photograph. I think all these colors and pattern were just a little overwhelming for my camera.

 I started this quilt after seeing Chase's Everything but the kitchen sink quilt and the plan was to use up as many of my orphan blocks as possible. 

 I started off with these liberated pinwheels. Well, they actually looked a little different when I started as I decided to chop the block up and add that red strip of fabric just for fun.

 I then played with lots of HSTs and turned them into different blocks,

while using fabric from my stash to fill in all the empty spaces. I was trying to stick with low volume fabric as my filler, since I didn't want to add to the busyness of the whole quilt.

I made a simple backing and quilted The Puzzle in straight lines about 1 1/2" apart.

I then used red and white polka dotty fabric for the binding - I think it finishes it off so very nicely.

To sum it all up, this was one tricky quilt to make. My design wall proved to be the most useful tool for this project as I kept arranging and re-arranging all the blocks many times. There was lots of Y-seams, chopping off and adding to the blocks, and the seam ripper was my constant companion throughout the process. I've never made a quilt in this way before and I loved every minute of making it very, very much.

If you'd like to read my older posts about making this quilt you can check them out here and here.

Thank you so much for stopping by. Svetlana