I'm Doing Stuff: Socken Quilt-A-Long Progress

http://www.flickr.com/photos/notebookdoodles/

The Cherry House Quilts Socken Quilt Quilt-A-Long is hopping right along. This week, we were to sew together all of our baby 1.5 x 1.5 inch squares into color-coordinated strips. This went together so quickly for me that I ultimately decided that I could move on to the next step.

Once I had ironed out my 5 pieced strips, I decided that I wanted my quilt to be a little bit bigger. I know, I know, I know.... I said I wouldn't fuss with someone else's pattern before I had tried it out, but my need to stash-bust got the better of me and so I cut 5 extra color squares for each pieced strip. So I essentially added 10 more squares :) to increase the length.

I then ironed my wide strips and prepared to sew to the pieced strips and I realized ---- gee, this is the reason that we only cut 18 1.5 x 1.5 inch squares to begin with: this is the width of the fabric. Duh. So I pieced in an extra 10 or so inches to end of each of my wide strips. I was very happy that I had a plain background with minimal large flowers randomly placed as the design. I think it turned out really good and it is going to be hard to tell from a distance where I pieced in the extra 10 inches on these strips.

Finished Quilt top

A little bit of a close up

Close up of the red and the orange pieced strips

Close up of the yellow and green pieced strips

I am incredibly happy with how this quilt top went together (very speedy and perfect for an adorable baby quilt!!!) and how lovely the final product is. I can't wait to post this to flickr, but am going to wait until the rest of the group is at the final step. I don't want to be the person who goes ahead before they are supposed to..... ya know?

I guess the next step now is to figure out how I am going to quilt this pretty little baby. I am leaning towards trying my hand at hand quilting. Here are a few pictures of what I am currently inspired by: