My latest project in-progress is a kind of scrap-mosaic quilt. I realized I have a lot of fabric I haven't used and was liking the idea of something more scrappy. So I got the idea of creating a background image on the quilt using half-square triangles with one half black or grey and one half a scrap. (That sentence will hopefully make more sense once you look at the picture).

My sketch is below:

Thank goodness for AutoCAD

So the background image is just an abstract swirl. I think it kind of looks like the bottom half of a mermaid. I was brainstorming other images to do, and I drew a pretty spiffy Abraham Lincoln, but I couldn't convince myself that anyone else besides me would be amused by it.

Do I not amuse you?

I also thought about a bird on a branch and a spherical shape. However, in the end I went back to my original concept. I hope I am satisfied in the end.

Here it is on my wall, minus the top eight rows:

It is quite fun rearranging the squares

Shown below is the portion I have sewn so far. Boy are there a lot of seams....the finished size of each square is 1.75", so that is pretty darn small. I used the shortcut method of sewing each half square triangle in which two sandwiched square pieces of fabric are sewn together on the diagonal and then cut apart to create two identical half-square triangles. A handy-dandy explanation of the method is described here.

Orange Purple People Eater Purse

I call this Orange and Purple People Eater Purse because I am pretty sure I could fit a toddler inside it.

Suffice it to say, it turned out way bigger than I planned.

I wish it was smaller, but the quilt pieces were so small, I don't think I could have made it much smaller without changing the quilt block.

Nope. No toddler inside.

 I found the pattern in a book from the library and thought it was cool. I kind of makes a curvy shape using a bunch of triangles and quadrilaterals. Maybe I will make a quilt someday using this pattern, although there are lots of little pieces as you can see...

Meta-Lonestar Quilt

So today I am finally posting about the quilt that I had been working on for months. It is queen-size, so I don't feel so bad that it took so long. It was slightly my goal to enter it in the county fair, however I didn't finish in time, and I didn't want to rush something into which I had already invested so much time (and $). Ben really wanted me to enter it into the fair, and when we actually went there he kept saying how mine was so much better. I don't know if that is true, but I am really happy with the results. If I had entered it and won 1st place, the prize money was about $8. No joke. That I think that is the cost of a ticket to get into the fair (not including parking fee). It is almost insulting to win such an insignificant amount of money...but mostly it is just amusing.

Anyway, the actual quilt. I posted about it a little while ago here. I was going for a Turkish tile color scheme. I wanted a complex design in the middle with a blank background...I feel like the blank background makes it a little more modern (maybe that is just me). The center is a lonestar design surrounded by little baby lonestars and de-capitated baby lonestars (I really did de-capitate them; I made a whole one and then sliced it in half).

Therefore, I name it the Meta-Lonestar quilt.

When I take pictures for work, I sometimes put a hammer or pencil in it for scale...for this, I put myself in for scale.

So meta....

For the quilting, I kind of went around in circles, then I outlined the star on the edges. I was convinced I wouldn't be able to quilt it with my little machine, but it actually went quite smoothly. However, there were a few tug-of-war episodes with the machine as I stood up and tried to pull the bunched up fabric through the opening in the machine arm.

Kind of like this...

And after a couples tug-o-wars, this was the result. Pretty good for a chubby ten-year old Chinese boy, right?

 For the back, I stumbled upon a fabric with my exact color scheme; it wasn't in the quilting fabric area of Joann's because it is some apparel-y fabric by April Johnston (from Project Runway...yay). Then I just used pieces of fabric that were in the quilt top to create that strip of strips.

And now it is in our room! For the pillow shams, I wanted something more simple, since the quilt itself is so busy. I recreated one of the stars and put half of one on each end of the pillow. I quilted in white for contrast and echoed the star shape. I do think it is kind of cool how the pillows sitting next to each other create a single star. Ooh...that could be some barf-tastic symbol for Ben and me "completing each other".

Yes, my nightstand is a plastic set of drawers. Your eyes are not mistaking you.

This was one of the results when I searched for "barf-tastic" on google. It is a naked baby made of marzipan, and I agree that it is barf-tastic.

In conclusion, I am pretty proud of how the quilt turned out. The center lonestar was pretty quick and easy to construct; the rest of it was what took a long time. Those baby lonestars are pretty small and there were 48 I had to make. I am thinking of entering this quilt in the county fair next year. Maybe I will win $8!