Sidetracked by Scraps

After I made the block for Thimbleberries the other night, I started messing around with the scraps leftover from that block; as is typical for me, when I made the flying geese star points, I made small half-square triangles out of the leftovers and then I felt I needed to do something with them.  Well, the goofy thing is that playing around with those leftover scraps sucked up two evenings in the Sweat Shop.  I did finally end up with a small wallhanging quilt top, although it still needs to be quilted and bound.

While I was working on this, I remembered that some quilting acquaintances of mine participated in a different sort of round robin awhile back where instead of adding borders to the center quilt starts, each person who got the quilts was supposed to cut through what already existed and add something to it.  Their quilts turned out pretty interesting, so when I started thinking my star center was looking kind of boring, I decided to add a few slices and splices.  I think the checkerboard border is a little too traditional for the unusual, asymetrical center but it's okay, I think.  At least I was able to use up a few more scraps and experiment a bit--because sometimes it's fun to push the traditional quilting boundaries, isn't it?  And doing it with leftover scraps makes it fairly painless if something doesn't turn out quite right!

If this particular slice and splice idea looks like something you'd like to try, I cut the red strips at 1", so when the block was cut and the red strips were sewn back in, it remained the same size with the same underlying pattern.  Those other quilts I saw from the round robin had a lot of pieced strips added in as well as a curved line or two and some applique.  Try something different this week and see what happens!