Pandamonium: A Tale of Three Layouts

My big goal for February was to finally assemble my panda top!  I pulled out the stack of blocks that hadn't been touched in 18 months and had my kids sort them out.   I quickly that realized Plan A (as described in my goal post) wasn't going to work. Some the blocks had pluses in them and the whole thing was already pretty busy.

I decided to simplify and move onto Plan B, a simple 7x9 layout using the two yards of Spectrastatic in Tar that I bought recently without a plan for.  I'm a sucker for a good blender and this is my newest favorite.  The gray and black combo meant it matched everything without being distracting.

But after I'd cut all the horizontal sashing and sewed it to the top of each row, I decided that this wasn't going to work either.  Traditional grids aren't my favorite and I feel like I've fallen back on this a lot recently just because it's easy.  So I decided to off-set the blocks and immediately felt much better.

This also let me create nine half-blocks, all featuring leftover pandas, to create the off-set.  I've been doing a lot of repetitive blocks-making lately so it felt great to do a couple of one-offs, even if they were all pretty simple.  This one is my favorite - that was the entire scrap of the black and white fabric and I love the teeny-tiny black stripe separating the sections!

I added a final border of the Spectrastatic and the top is done!

The lighting is a little off, but I'm not going to stress about it in a picture of a flimsy - you get the general idea!  I haven't decided how I'll quilt this yet, but that's ok because my basting pins are all currently being used in my 2018 Summer Sampler.  I do know it's going to have a beautiful scrappy binding around that plain gray border though!

I've got the first of my foundation lines in and I'm starting by adding some straight line segments with my walking foot.  I don't have a real plan for this besides the fact that it will be a mix of free motion and straight line quilting.  Nothing is actually set in stone until the ends are buried.  I'm hoping to have this finished by the end of March; my goal is custom quilting but without going overboard.

I'm linking up the successful finish of my February goals at Elm Street Quilts!