WIP: Vintage Ornaments Top Pieced

This week I finished the piecing on the Vintage Ornaments quilt top. It drove me a bit crazy, but I got all the ornaments to face upright! I only had to remove the two outer strips from two blocks out of thirty to correct the handedness. Here is the six-block high by five block wide top.

I have some unusual fabric selected from my stash that I would love to use for the back. It has a Renaissance time Leonardo da Vinci kind of feel to it and, although the colors are not an exact match, I like how they play off the Vintage Ornaments colorway.

I need 3¾ yard and I have only 3. The quilt is 70" long so I can run it the length with no problem but then I'll need fabric for the long edges since the top is 60" wide. Alas, running it crosswise has insufficient yardage too, even though the print could tolerate being turned crosswise. Here is a closeup of the fabric. It portrays the sense of time travel with the pocket watch and old fashioned luggage. And those plum feathers just tickle me... pun not intended.

I went to my local shop to try to get more of the aqua or deeper bluish grunge for the long edges of the back but they did not have any.  I really do not want to order on line since I am not quite sure of the color name without holding it next to the backing fabric. My selvage gives the pattern number 30150 but not the -xx afterward that defines the color.

My local quilt shop did not have any appropriate Moda Marble either, which could be a possibility to widen the da Vinci fabric. They did have this option which sort of goes with my da Vinci print. But it has a gold overlay that I am not really keen on since there is just a tad of silver in the da Vinci. The background green is compatible so I bought a fat quarter to have at home while I mull it over.

Considering a radically different alternative to the da Vinci fabric I'm not ruling out using this Wintergraphix by Jason Yester. I have 2 yards each of the two prints and would not need to buy any more fabric for the backing. I think if I went this route I would put the stripe down the center and spread the more vibrant red out along the two long edges.

I still think my first choice is to try to hunt down a bit more of that paler Grunge Basic or a blending Moda Marble to widen the da Vinci fabric. It just seems so perfect for the Vintage Ornaments.

I have no new or completed projects for this week and have only managed to add to the list of projects in progress I posted last week. But I enjoyed piecing the Vintage ornaments top and that is the point of quilting! I am hooking up to today's Freshly Pieced post for WIP Wednesday.