A Zig and A Zag

On rare occasions, I start projects with no real purpose or intended recipient. So it was last fall that I cut out some red, yellow, and aqua squares, and starting playing around with zig-zags.

Fast-forward to this summer when a friend from college very generously offered to let me stay in her apartment while I was in town doing research while she wasn't even there. That deserves a massive thank you. At which point half-baked ideas and projects are really really useful. Those fun zig-zags became a pretty sweet (if you ask me) table runner.

And I had just the right fun floral to use on the back -- with an additional red slab of one of my favorite reds from the front. The runner ended up being about 50 or 52 inches long, a tad longer than planned, but, coincidentally, just the length of her table. And the back shows off teh zig-zag quilting quite well (again, in my esteemed opinion).

I debated adding in another color for the binding, but ultimately decided that the saturated yellow looked best. I was a little under the wire finishing this before I hopped on a plane, but I've become a bit of machine-binding speed demon of late, a skill that comes in handy when you resist hand-binding and need to finish a gift as you're running out the door. Or the night before you're running out the door because 5 am is awfully early and machine-binding at that hour would be dangerous since I generally like having all my fingers, and that week I needed them to sift through papers at the archives.