Crown Royal Quilt



My brother has a friend that likes Crown Royal!!!



So he sent me a LOT of these bags for me to make a quilt for him.

My first task was to remove the stitches on the top of the bags to open them up and remove the draw string and then I cut as close as possible to the edge of the golden thread serged edges of the front and back of the bag.  This left me with an equal amount of front, back, and side strip fabric to work with.

I put a blue strip of painters tape on my ruler so that I could position the writing in the same spot on each rectangle I cut.  This was much faster than measuring it out every time.  So far I am only working with the medium size bags since that is what I have the most of.  I cut my rectangles 8" X 4.5" and occasionally I had to remove the stitching off the bottom corner edges to reduce the bulk.  I was able to cut most of the strips at 2.25".  I tried to cut so that I got the largest piece that I could.

In this picture you can see some of the bottom corners look a tiny bit rounded.  That is where I removed a little bit of serged edge.

My strip sets were pieced with the 3 center strips cut at 2.25" wide.  The top and the bottom gold strips were cut 2".  My seams were sewn at just a little over a quarter inch.  It was around 3/8ths to make the strip sets come out 8".  I then cut the strip sets at 8" X 4.5" to match the solid rectangles.  I will probably use the back pieces (with no writing on them) to piece a border, but I haven't gotten that far yet.  I still have the black bags that I can use somewhere.  This has been kind of a figure-it-out-as-you-go kind of project.  My brother never looks at my blog, so I am safe to post all of this and it will still be a surprise to him.  

Hopefully I will have this top finished next week so that I won't be overwhelmed during the quickly approaching holidays!!!  I have linked this post to Freemotion by the River for linky Tuesday.  Check out what others are working on!