FOTY 2013 Top

Fabric of the Year 2013 Top
Fabric of the Year 2013 Top

One of my goals for Labor Day was to finish the Fabric of the Year 2013 top. This was a daunting goal, because each piece has to be sewn to another one in a certain order.

That meant that I started in one corner (see below), sewed two pieces together, put a leader/ender in the machine right after the two FOTY pieces, sewed those, took the FOTY pieces out of the machine, pressed them and put them back on the wall before taking the next two pieces. Repeat. There are 306 pieces in this quilt, so I made progress on ~306 pieces from other projects as well.

FOTY 2013 Back
FOTY 2013 Back

This project is extremely taxing in terms of piecing. I was pretty much done with the project when I finished top, so I did try to piece the back with large pieces of fabric. I used two pieces of different Philip Jacobs fabric. They go together well enough and I enjoy the large lettuces. They make me laugh. I hope I’ll still laugh when I am liking the project much better.

Normally, I would have put a quilting border on it, but I emailed Colleen and she said just to stitch 1/8″ away from the edge and that would keep the quilt from getting out of shape when it is quilted. I hope it works, because I want the shape of the quilt today to be the shape of the quilt forever. If it works, I’ll have to remember this trick for the future. I do like using ugly fabric as a quilting border, though.

Below are some photos of the project in process.

FOTY 2013 in process
FOTY 2013 in process
FOTY 2013 in process
FOTY 2013 in process
FOTY 2013 in process
FOTY 2013 in process