Marc's Quilt Top is Finished

I made some progress on the quilt for my sweet and adorable hubby. I was waiting on two last blocks to come in and, much to my surprise they unexpectedly showed up in my mailbox. I was not the only one who was excited. Marc has been dropping not so little hints about how I never make him anything so he was thrilled when we opened the envelope.

I moved my design wall into our dining room so I could experiment with layouts. (I will reserve gushing over my love of my "portable" design wall until a later post.) I had asked the members of the Sewn Together Bee who helped me construct these blocks to align the stripes of the circles either horizontal or perpendicular to the grain of the wood fabric. Every single block came back with the stripes going with the grain with the exception of one so I decided to make two more going against the grain to help balance out the overall design.

I also came up one block short so I came up with this...

The overall design was five across and five down but the question was how to layout the three irregular blocks. I called in Marc since ultimately this is his quilt. We knew that we wanted one of them to be the center square but we weren't sure where we wanted to place the other two. We played around with them flanking the center square to the right and left. Then we tried stacking them above and below the center square but we ended up placing them diagonally. It seemed to suit us both.

After that I laid out the rest of the blocks, moving them around based on color, pattern and stripe width until I came up with an aesthetic I liked. And I'm thinking it's working. Well, I hope so because the quilt top is officially done. The layout was the hard part. This is going to end up being the largest quilt I've quilted to date. It's kind of exciting, but since the only space I think I can lay it out to make my quilt sandwich is in our living room I need to wait to make the sandwich until I have a little time. Thanks to our dog, Jack, I need to lay it out and pin it all in one sitting.

I am still on the fence about this quilt. I'm still not sold on it. Some days I tidally dig it and others... not so much. But Marc loves it and thinks it's cool so that's all that matters.