Project Quilting - 50 Rectangle Challenge

Season 1 of Project Quilting has begun (the first two entries were under a different format, so it's almost like starting over!)

This week's challenge is to create a quilt using no more than fifty 3" x 5" rectangles, and only two additional 1/2 yard cuts to finish the top, backing, and binding. Whew, that's gonna be tough!

At first my mind drew a blank, but I did some mindless cutting this afternoon, and happened on an idea, which required me to cut into several pieces of some really luscious Thai silk taffeta that I picked up last month. Here's a picture of my 50 rectangles, all cut out:



Aren't they gorgeous? Before Project Quilting, I would have just kept these put away on a shelf and just stared at them every once in a while - but something about this challenge just made me want to use them. I can tell you though - I was SUPER careful while pressing this and cutting it - I don't think you'd find more than 1 square inch of waste off of any of these, and I still have quite a bit left over for another project.

I haven't fully formed the rest of my idea quite yet; the restriction on the additional yardage is really making me stop & think really hard about what I'm going to do here. I'm not sure whether I'm going to end up actually using a real binding on these since that does take a bunch of fabric & there's not much to spare! At least I don't have to use all of the rectangles!


Happy quilting!