All In A Row wall quilt inspiration

I made this little quilt for the Little Quilt - Sew, Vote, Swap Group

I was inspired by these quilt as you go blocks by Marianne Haak, MariQuilts Strips On Stripes.  Marianne's style for quilts is so awesome!  I could look at her quilts all day long.  Anyway, I started with a favorite piece of fabric of mine...the black and white stripe.  I cut through it to insert the black and white check.  Since it's a quilt as you go (QAYG), I layered the batting and just a muslin back since it's intended to hang on the wall.  Then I started choosing fabrics to sew/quilt between the stripes...making new colorful stripes.  I loved the way the strips were making the check look.

This little quilt was always intended for the swap.  But I really liked it and did not want to let it go.  I hung it on the wall thinking I'd get tired of looking at it.  Then the more I looked at it, the more I thought I'd like maybe the same thing with a bit more white in the background and less black stripes.  So I went scrounging around for a different b&w stripe.  I found this:

It's an inexpensive grade of fabric (you can tell when you work with it it gets fuzzy looking) but it would be good for a trial run as a mug rug.  I could let my husband use it and not care when it turned coffee stained.  It came out looking like so:

I liked it, it showed more white, but I wasn't real happy with the stripe.  I  

decided the background fabric needed to be white with a black pinstripe.  Well of course I decided that...I could not find that fabric anywhere local or in cyberland.  If I wanted that, I was going to have to make it myself.   

So I did.  I sewed fat white strips of fabric to black strips of fabric so that the black strip would end up being 1/8".  I really hate when my plan of attack doesn't work out!  That wasn't straight no matter how careful I was.  You guessed it...you're NOT gonna see a picture of that!

For several days I "mused" on this seemingly impossible want.  It finally hit me!  The way to make my own stripes and have them straight was to paper piece them!  Geezelouise why did that take so long?!  so I did these paper pieced stripes:

and then stitched in the checks:

and then stitched in some colorful stripes and added the binding for this end result:

All three of these little quilts turned out different looking.  I'm considering taking the black binding off this last one and trying either white or one of my other b&w tiny tight stripe bindings.  But at the moment, my first one is still my favorite.  I guess I have to call it Julie's now, not mine...it's been mailed...it was so hard to let it drop into that big blue box knowing I could not get it back out.  hahaha.  I've teased on flickr that if my partner seriously doesn't really like it, she could send it back to me.  Which she can, but if she does want to keep it, I COULD make myself another.  I'm just not good at making the same thing more than once...so it'll probably never happen.  I hope you enjoy my little quilt, Julie.

I received this meticulously created little quilt in exchange.   It was created by Martha Wolf (moogiequilter). 

I love this little creation so much that I'm not missing mine quite so much anymore.  Thank you Martha!

Thanks for stopping by today,

Annie