Second Necktie Project Finished

Yesterday I finished necktie wall hanging number two.  

It was inspired by a wall hanging in my entryway that I was taking down a couple weeks ago to replace with a more holiday-themed decoration.  All that Pinterest browsing for necktie projects and the inspiration was literally dangling right in front of my nose!

I had made it from a kit I picked up somewhere in the early days of my quilting experience.  Luckily, I still had the instructions (and homemade templates).  It's dated 2003, so I must have made the original kit wall hanging within a year or two of that.

I had set aside certain other ties to use for a second project while I was working on the first one.  The second project would use different blue and red ties, including the wild blue paisley and red swirly silk ties, which were my personal favorites.

First was to stabilize the fabrics with interfacing, using the Bi-Stretch Lite again.  I have to say the more I worked with it, the more I appreciated this particular interfacing.  It worked especially well on the finicky silks, as well as the poly, acetate, and rayon blends.

Then it was just a matter of cutting everything out.  I had to be judicious about cutting the pieces so as to get the right number from the limited amount of fabric available in a necktie.  

I played around with the layout a while, changed a few things around, and then sewed up the nine blocks.  As far as sashing fabric, I'm really trying to stay out of the stores and heed that little voice in my head that says, "Use what you have."  I auditioned batiks...oh, no.  Black fabric played up the drama, but seemed a little too depressing.  Kept coming back to this silvery gray.  I think it has enough variation in the gray to complement the shimmer of the tie fabrics.  Is it perfect?  No, but good enough.

These pictures are reading more of a pea soup green color in the lower corners of the blocks than they appear in real life.  They're more of a gold, or maybe olive gold color. 

For the quilting, I experimented on a sample with a meander and some other designs, but it reminded me of a quilted bathrobe in texture, and that's not the look or feel I wanted.  So once again, simple straight lines won out.  

I toyed with the idea of sewing a small decorative button in the center of the "tulip" in the gold squares, but then I thought about tie tacks (pins).  If my friend has any of those from her late husband and wants to embellish it, she can give that a try.

This time I had a plan for some of the labels on the back.  I arranged them on the hanging sleeve before I sewed that on the back and stitched them down by machine.

All in all, I'm happy with how it turned out.  I'm not sure if there is another project in me to use the leftovers, but for now I think I'll take a break and do something else for a while.