It's finished!!!

Finished  -- Confetti quilt made from solid scraps into a queen size quilt

It's funny, when you spend nearly 6 months working on something, you get pretty excited about the final post!

The Confetti quilt was made to go on the murphy bed in the den at the cabin.  When we were initially designing the cabin, we faced a balancing act of keeping as much public area for us as we could, while still creating private space for guests when they were here.  In the end, we created both a guest room and a den in the plans.

Then the challenge was to come up with sleeping options for the den where the person/couple who ended up in the den didn't feel like they had drawn the short straw for the weekend.  After thinking through a variety of options, I came up with a murphy bed that goes into the wall like a closet.  This is much easier to pull off when you are designing a house, then to try to modify once you have a finished house.

View of murphy bed in den from main room

Our den is just off the great room.  We had found some fabulous old carriage doors at a 2nd hand store which we painted and then had the door frame built to handle them as a bi-fold (a second set was put side by side and hung like a barn door to close off the utility room).

The windows and built in desk in the den

 The den faces the mountains and the canal ... 

The 'view'

And of course ... now whoever gets this room gets to sleep under this sweet quilt!

Back of the Confetti quilt

Scraps of colors

Binding and meandering quilting

The quilt by the numbers:

• 440 blocks on the front, 132 blocks on the back -- 20 x 22 blocks
• Each block is comprised of 3 pieces -- 3.5" x 3.5" square accompanied by a 3.5" x 1.75" strip and a 4.75 x 1.75" strip.
• 75% of the pieces came from  my scrap bin.
• It is quilted with a light gray thread in a relatively light tight meandering pattern (which I accomplished on  my Pfaff portable home sewing machine).

The biggest surprise for me on this quilt was how much it shrank.  I expected 7%, it was over 10%.  It works fine on the murphy bed, but would not want to use it on a regular bed where's its set up all the time as it wouldn't have enough drop one either side ... it really should have been 22 x 23 blocks -- which would have required an additional 66 blocks.  I am not sure if it was the tight quilting that caused the additional shrinkage.  The only other queen size quilt I have made shrank by 7%, so that's where I got my thinking from, but it was quilted in a straight line with far less quilting.  

For anyone who's interested, here are the other posts created in the making of this quilt.

• Initial pattern idea
• Starting out
• Progress
• More progress
• Laying it out
• Creating the back
• Basting challenges
• And finally ... same quilt ... different colors

Other than the slight challenge with the shrinkage ... I am THRILLED with how it came out.  I've pulled the murphy bed down today for the photo shoot ... and now I don't want to put it away ... I like looking at this quilt, it's bright and it makes me smile ... just like a quilt should!

All the best

Lisa