A Quickie Quilt

So I've been having some issues with depression lately and getting bogged down both creatively, and in the use of my free time. So this past weekend I thought one way that might help me to break out of my funk would be to run out a quick and dirty project, both to recharge my batteries and drain-o the creative constipation I've been having (lovely visual yes?)

Seeing as it was St. Patrick's day, I thought - why not make an Irish Chain quilt?

Why not indeed.

It's a simple pattern that I'd done a variant of once before, so I scooped up my pile of coupons and snagged some quilting cotton at Joanns for a weekend of 'personal time' with my sewing machine (wow, 2 slightly disturbing visuals in one post - I'm on a roll!).

An Irish chain is a basic criss-cross design, and for this one I spiced it up by using 2 different colors in the background instead of one. I started with the idea that I wanted the color orange in this quilt. It's one of my favorite colors and I hadn't used it (in quantity) in any quilt to date. After falling for the perfect orange, I thought it would be cool to use fabric with circular patterns in it for each color. I like my fabrics in quilts to follow a 'theme'. All floral, all stripes, etc because I feel like it makes for a more cohesive design. After finding a teal-y blue and a white with copper metallic circles on it (how much more perfect could THAT find get???). I was set to go. You can see my selections on the right.

So in approximately 24 hours I made this:

I apologize for the bad pictures. I really need a good camera - these (like everything else) were taken on my phone. Also, obligatory 'kitty helped me' photo on the right!

The borders stumped me for a bit, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, especially since I didn't have miles of extra fabric. This top in the end used nearly every scrap of the 8.5 yards I had. I want to see if I can find the blue somewhere else so I can bind it in that color.

Before binding it will have to be quilted, but that will come later. I haven't settled on a pattern for the quilting yet and it's time to get back to other projects.

That said, it sure was nice to clear my head on this project!