It's Bananas! 100 Days 100 Blocks 2023

Today I am welcoming the newest 100 Days Quilt to the 100 Days Archive: Bananas!

Bananas is the 8th quilt that I have made with Ange and her 100 Days quilt-along challenge.  My theme this year is solids and low volume.  Each block was made up of solids and low volume prints from my stash.  In fact, only one fabric was purchased for this entire quilt, a low volume one that goes with the green block in the upper left.

The back is also from my stash, a colorful wideback that I have no recollection of purchasing.  It was a little bit short, so I extended it with the black (ink?) Spotted fabric that I also bound the quilt with.  I liked the Twister pantograph from my Wizard of Oz quilt so much that I had Lauren use it again on this one.  It's such a nice all-over pattern!

If you are counting carefully, you may notice that this quilt has more than 100 blocks in it.  I opted for one of the optional layouts, which required making many of the blocks more than once and then combining them together to make larger blocks.  There are technically 246 blocks in this quilt and at least 240 of them are actually part of the Maple and Eucalyptus pattern. This picture has a few of a combo blocks, a bunch of the single blocks, and a couple of blocks that I modified and/or added to the quilt.  The brilliant thing is, you can't tell which is which!

This quilt-along was a bit of a challenge for me because I like to assemble as I go, and the alternate layout meant that the blocks were not constructed in order (but I still wanted to post the correct blocks on the correct days).  I assigned each block a color in rainbow order for balance, then switched the colors around as I was sewing to make sure I liked the final placement of each one.  I relied heavily on my coloring sheet for this, which barely survived after an alteration with my rotary cutter.

And that's that.  Ange is planning on running the 100 Days quilt-along three times in 2024 and I already have my next theme planned, though I'll probably hold out for the new Incognito pattern in September.  Thanks for stopping by!