Panda Love (Pandamonium)
Pandamonium is finished! This one is subtitled "Panda Love" because everyone who sees it tells me how much they love the pandas! I started with a basic color palette inspired by the panda fabric itself (shown in the lower righthand corner block) and the rest is scrappy around that, using a tally mark system to balance the colors in the quilt. The sashing is Spectrastatic in Lunar, my new favorite blender, and was purchased over a year after the blocks were finished.
Finishing this top was my successful February goal and you can read more about the layout in that post. When I came back to it, I had a happy surprise: I knew that I had bought the hexagon panda fabric to back the quilt in, but completely forgot that I had bought an equal amount of yardage of a hexagon neutral from the same collection. That simplified making my back - I no longer had to piece an entire center strip together. I settled for a single stripe to show off my color palette yet again and incorporated a quilt label into it (something not all my quilts end up getting, oops!). And the dark gray borders on the center strip are leftover cuttings from my Trinket Quilt so the back has some scrappiness too! From there, a scrappy binding was the only way to go to finish it completely.
This quilt has been claimed by my youngest son and disappeared into his room as soon as I finished taking pictures.
I wanted to try something new with the quilting on this one and settled on horizontal wavy lines, kind of a cross between a meander, straight-line quilting, and wood grain. I started by doing them over the sashing pieces, then did the center of the blocks, then just filled it in until the lines were around an inch apart. This was honestly one of the easiest and quickest quilting motifs I've done and I did it with my regular piecing foot, I didn't even bother pulling out my walking foot!
It seemed extra appropriate that I decided to finish this this month when I got my mystery Animal Almanac cross-stitch chart and it was a panda too! Finishing a project that has been sitting so long (this was pieced in summer 2018 from Tula Pink's City Sampler book as part of the 100 Days 100 Blocks challenge) always feels just a little bit sweeter. For now, these pandas are hanging out with the panda pillow I made way back in July 2015 (the free pattern is still available!).
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