Quilted Pig

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Creating order from chaos

This quilt has been hanging around my sewing studio for months! It's been up on the design wall. It's been on the floor in hundreds of triangles after I left the window open on a windy day. It's been stacked neatly on my ironing board while I cut and designed something else. With the longarm machine out of the way, there really is no excuse for it not being finished.

Most of the hold-up was sorting out the edge treatment. I knew I didn't want to just cut a hexagon in half.

Once I had the edge sorted out, I was able to start piecing in the awkward little triangles. Wait, how'd that little guy get in there?

Much better. But it does give an example of what tiny little scraps I was working with to get these pieces done. All I have left of that fabric is one piece about the size of what's shown above.

My original quilting plan was to make an offset hexagon pattern to echo the piecing. Simple, right? But then I realized the spacing would be far enough apart that I would need a secondary set of echoes to avoid batting shifting. When I drew that out on paper, it became clear that I would end up stitching right down the seam lines, which isn't what I wanted. 

What to do? I'm bored with stitching spirals, and all of my other designs are too curvy for this angular quilt. The solution? Square spirals!

I also added in some little funky bits where the spirals didn't end exactly where I wanted to. The pic below is actually of the back. Since I didn't know how it would end when I started, I had some extra hexagons. I pieced them in where the backing would have been seamed anyway.

I used the Magic Binding technique to add a little pop(!) to the front edge. You can see in the giraffe looking block that I used some of the Quilt Across Texas tesselating fabric. I used the red colorway and the black/white one.

I used the Magic Binding technique to add a little pop(!) to the front edge.

Here is the front. Please disregard our lumpy grass, I was looking for light. :)


And here is the back. Chaos, indeed.