I got back to sewing - as I wanted to get busy and finish up this series. I have so many other things I want to do this calendar year if I can.

I already had the last two tops of this series all cut out and in pieces before my son and his family came. I had put the remaining fabrics somewhere - maybe I’ll use them for some final decorator pillows before FINALLY throwing what’s left into my strips bags.

I focused the last two days on finishing up this small quilt - it is not a large one - it’s only about 60”x72” or so. It’s number #12 in the series and the last one I have in mind. Number #11 is still in pieces but I did spend a few minutes on it. Half of the blocks for that one are finished and the other blocks are getting there. It will involve no sashing or borders, so once I finish the blocks, it will be just a matter of sewing the blocks together - sort of like this one was.

I already wrote up this quilt pattern as a 2.5” strips quilt. This quilt is exactly the same but it is using small strips - I call them bricks. Bricks by my definition are pieces of fabric that are rectangles that are are a width of fabric by 2x that number minus .5 inch. That means, the sizes are as follows = 1.5”x2.5”, 2”x3.5”, 2.5”x4.5”, 3”x5.5”, etc. (I’ve also used these things several times in other quilts such as Mosaic in 3 versions and Native Splendor which are all very nice and available on our free patterns page.)

This is what Scrappy Islands looks like in blues and whites.

I also made this for my son and his wife in teals and browns.

With THIS version I needed to make a dark background as I had quite a few of those light colored pieces leftover. They would not show up against cream so I chose to go with navy. I had to choose something that I had and I had a piece of navy that was super nice and dark - and it was 3 yards. It was just enough to make this size.

I did sew up these small blocks (4” finished) in groups of 4 , so they ended up being an 8”x8” finished block when 4 were put together. They looked like this. It is really the best way for me to keep track of everything.

This size of quilt top took 252 blocks, so I did use over 1000 of those small bricks to make this top. I’m not one who usually counts pieces, but I was sharing with my husband as he was looking at the top. He thought the top was kind of cool and liked it a lot.

I did spend some time using my sticky lint remover, but I can see that I need to do it some more! Any time you deal with such small pieces, they are bound to have lots of little threads!

You can see I had a lot of those cream based fabrics!

Here is one more photo.

I’ve loving this top - as does my husband. While I tried NOT to have exact fabrics touch, it did happen once in a while in the putting of the blocks together, but not all that often. I decided I am not worrying about it at all - it happens.

Here is the Stephanie Slewinski series of quilt tops.

The fabrics I used are here!