Completion of Fifty Shades of Taupe

Yesterday was a beautiful, but very windy, sunny day in California, as I sat upstairs in my sewing room by the open window putting the last few stitches in the binding of my Fifty Shades of Taupe quilt. My emotions were a mixture of pride and relief, and yet I was also feeling a bit lost. A quilt is like one of my children. I am proud that they have grown up so well and are thriving on their own. I am a bit relieved that my efforts with them are essentially done, and done pretty well. But I am also a bit lost, needing to find something equally enjoyable, another project to which I can devote my time and creative energy. I must either face a UFO or a blank design wall. So I put off starting the next sewing project and began to write a blog post, instead.

Four previous posts for the creation of this quilt were published on my DianeLoves2Quilt blog on Jun 16, Jun 7, Feb 6, Feb 4, two for assembly and two for quilting.  That time gap between February and June was me subliminally thinking about how I wanted to quilt it. I may have lost a bit of momentum (as I was determined not to do per my Feb 6 post) but I regained it.

My last step before binding is creation of a label. For labeling my quilts I typically embroider my name, the date, and the name of the quilt on grosgrain ribbon and set those diagonally in the bottom two corners of the quilt. Each of the eight memory channels on my Pfaff Triptonic 2040 can hold 20 characters. My name and the year is 19 characters long. So far so good. My quilt name Fifty_Shades_of_Taupe is 21 characters long. Bummer. I knew substituting the number 50 for the word Fifty to spell 50_Shades_of_Taupe was an easy solution but it did not have the same appeal. Christian Grey from the novel Fifty Shades of Grey would not have skimped that way merely for an economy of characters. (My insight into that controversial book is in the first third of my Wander or Ponder post for March 24, 2015.) Then I came up with an idea which in hindsight seems obvious but wasn't at the time. I programmed "Fifty_" into a memory slot and "Shades_of_Taupe" into another memory slot and then sewed one immediately after the other. It worked like a charm and these are the labels I attached to the lower two corners, tucked tidily underneath the binding.

My binding is ⅜" wide and went on very smoothly with no major snags. The final quilt measured 60½" by 79½" so it took me several hours over a couple of days to unhurriedly hand-stitch 280" with music from my iPad playing softly in the background. It is similar to when your child leaves home for college or a job and you are left to reflect.  Hmmm... I noticed from a previous post that the assembled blocks measured 62½" by 82½" so quilting can take up about 2"-3" inches in each dimension on a quilt this size.

This quilt took enough effort (quilting, more so than piecing) that it is going to stick around my home for a while and not be given away. Unlike children, there will be no leaving the nest for this one - at least not in the near future. But then again there are so many quilts at my home I think it is near impossible to empty the nest. Just about every room has a quilt or two to curl up in and read or watch TV. Here are closeups of one corner, a foursome of blocks showing the print variety, and one solitary block. The solitary block is a favorite of mine because of the print and because the lines in the plus are straight, parallel, and equally spaced. I have omitted photos of those blocks whose lines are not so well behaved.

I had to wait until the next day for the wind to die down so my husband could hold Fifty Shades of Taupe outdoors for photos. The sun bleached out the contrast and so we photographed it in the shade. Here are the front and back. 

This quilt does not display my usual array of colors but it pleases me, even though it is outside my comfort zone. The indoor photo, although not straight on, is better for color clarity and tells me that neutrals can be appealing, too, especially if they showcase a variety of patterns as these do! My stretch to solids also shows off my FMQ more crisply, so I need to try a repeat on using non-prints. Fifty Shades of Taupe was a learning experience for me ... but definitely a far different learning experience (blush) from that of Anastasia Steele in the novel titled Fifty Shades of Grey. Still, I like the tongue-in-cheek parody of the erotic novel and I like this quilt! I hope others will like it too when I share at Cooking Up Quilts Main Crush #182.