I told you with the last one I showed that I wanted to make a different color scheme - and so I did.

I sat at the computer and considered what I was “in the mood to make”. That is so much of what I am doing with these scrappy ones. I have to just ‘feel it’ or I just won’t finish it.

I already have another one I’m getting ready to work on that is black and white so I purposely wanted to do a browns one.

So here it is.

I also am not in the mood for an extremely complicated one. As I worked on this one, however, it did become slightly more involved.

At first where you see those blocks with half of a checkerboard - well, they started out a simple off white square.

However, I wanted to up the design a bit and so I kept playing with it and came up with this. I can show you, I suppose. I actually had several of the smaller checkerboards at first around the outside of the design.

Then, I just decided to try something different and I preferred that.

Let me digress a bit.

I had made this cross quilt - remember that one? Maybe not. If you don’t, it’s here.

I decided that once again I wanted to work with checkerboard blocks, while at the same time creating contrast by changing the size of the pieces in the block. I showed that above.

After working on the design and letting it gel a bit, this is what I ended up with.

Here is the layout that I am using - so you can see I needed 16 of the smaller checkerboards and 34 of the larger ones. Well, truthfully they are all the same size - 10.5” before being sewn into the top - it’s just that the 1” checkerboards were a lot more work to make!

Did I say that I wanted to stay simple? My, oh my, what was I thinking? These are the blocks that were needed for this top.

Then, in addition to the actual pieced blocks, I needed side setting triangles, corner setting triangles, sashing and cornerstones in two colors. All together, I needed all of these!!! I guess considering how big the finished top is, it didn’t take too long to make all of these blocks.

Putting this monster together (after the blocks were made) took about 9 hours! Yes, that’s crazy, crazy! But it took pretty much all of one day.

I started at about 10:30 am and worked til almost noon at which I went downstairs to work on dinner. Then I started in again at about 2 pm. With a few breaks for feeding the cat, refilling my drinks/potty breaks, and photo breaks, I finished at about 9:15. Doesn’t that make close to 9 hours? Whatever it was, it was long! Pretty intense.

I did not constantly take photos because it was not the type of design that mattered where I put which block where unlike some patterns - except for the side setting triangles. I did take a few pictures, however.

Here they are. By the end of the process of putting it together, I had made three sections.

Once I had the top finished, I had problems finding a good place to take a photo. My husband saw the predicament and (after about 3 days of it just lying in the living room) we removed the sawhorses and the puzzle we did months ago now so the floor has more space! (He’s supposed to make me a frame for the puzzle so it can hang on the wall in the long arm room - but he also has to get ‘in the mood’ to make such a thing. It’s okay - the lack of a puzzle on the wall is absolutely not hindering me in any way.)

My top shot, taken from me sitting on our staircase -

And here -

Anyway, this particular monster of a top is 101”x119” and would be a very nice queen size quilt which would allow for a pillow tuck. Probably it could work for a king as well, though I tend to think they should be wider than 101”. But it’s large.

And yes, I like it. It just took forever to put together! :) Slight exaggeration.

So what comes after this? I determined to make the next couple of tops with more from my bags of strips and less background. This one did use up a bit - but for all that, I used about the same amount of cream as I did the browns - more, actually because of the sashing.

Anyway….

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

Thanks for coming along with me.

Oh - and if you have any ideas for a name for this top, I’d love to hear it! Thanks!

Be sure to check out what my sis has for you in the store here!

Feel free to browse the site.