Changing This Story: I'm a Ginger Monkey Block Quilt

This is another long term WIP that I'm really pleased to have finished.

We stayed in York this year over Christmas and our families came to us, I'm not sure it was any easier than travelling to see them (our parents live over 200 miles away and 75 miles apart so Christmas usually involves a week long 'expedition' round the sound of England) as we ended up with my family over Christmas and my in laws over New Years so looking back I feel like I spent 12 days cleaning, washing, cooking, washing up and 'entertaining' relatives. In reality we did have a couple of quiet days just us at home in the middle doing not a lot and I decided to have a go at finishing something on my finish along list.

The project I came along first in my sewing room was my pile of blocks for my I'm a ginger monkey quilt.

The quilt started life in Summer 2013, I'd bought Katy @Imagingermonkey new book and made one of the projects, a pincushion/sewing storage caddy to go over the arm of a chair which was quickly put to good use.

I then decided to make a little quilt from some of the blocks in the book. I chose 20 of the 25 and worked out that if I used each fabric twice, once in one of the blocks with the tiny squares and once in one of the other blocks, I'd need 56 fabrics so I raided my scraps bin and cut out all the bits for my 20 blocks. I also cut out all the background fabric for each block out of sketch in Charcoal. I then bagged up each block:

The idea was to be able to grab a bag and the book when I had a small amount of time to sew in an evening so I could just sew rather than have to worrying about cutting too and be able to do the blocks over a few weeks. I started well in August 2013:

But by the end of October I'd only done 8 and then it all got packed away and put in the corner of my sewing room (I see a theme here) only to be got out again when I started my finish along 2014 quarter 3 list in July 2014:

In August I made 6 more of the blocks:

And made the final 6 in September, finishing the top two at Leeds MQG:

Laid them all out, decided on polka dot sashing, and then left them again to be added to my finish along 2014 quarter 4 list:

So I grabbed these again on 28th December, found some Moda Tiny Dottie in Jet Black from Simply Solids in my stash and cut the sashing and stitched up a quilt top:

The good thing about the living room being clear from Christmas and the small size of this quilt it was easy to baste (backed with Ikea Rosalie in blue with red dots) and the next day I quilted, in Aurifil 2600 in a 2 inch diagonal hatching pattern:

I bound it in red sketch to compliment the charcoal and frame the quilt and hand finished the binding on the Monday evening and here it is, 29 by 36 inches, lots of different blocks, lots of different fabrics: