Quilt Family

So my vacay (love that word) has almost come to an end - I head back to Tejas the day after tomorrow. I do have something to show for myself, however. Behold, Broken Dishes:



It's roughly 36" x 50". Don't mind all those lumps in the border - my parents floor is just buckled in a lot of places. Kidding! Kidding! That, friends, is just an example of a hastily and poorly applied border. I wanted to get the border on it just so I could say I completed a quilt top on my vacation, so I did a haphazard job of it. But, I'm not going to fix it until some far distant day when I'm actually going to quilt this top, so I decided to share the picture anyway. You still get the overall visual affect, just imagine it with a flat border. (I think normally I'd be too embarrassed to show it, but whatevs. We're all friends here.)

When I made this quilt:



I created a huge stack of leftover half square triangle units. When I made flying geese units for the star points I used the quick piecing method that involves starting with a rectangle and two squares and cutting of the corners eventually. At the time I went ahead and added an extra seam before cutting so that the part I cut off was a completely HST unit and not just two renegade triangles. I put all those extra HST units in a box, not trimmed or pressed, and saved them for someday.

My first day of vacation last Friday I began poking through my stash for a project to play with and came across said HSTs. Fun to play with? Not exactly, but I didn't realize that until I'd already put so much time into it that I wasn't going to back out. But yeah - I had to spend hours trimming and pressing before I could even start sewing. The more hours of chain piece, trim, press, repeat. No worries, though, because I really love the final product.

This is actually the second top I've completed from the scraps of the blue stars quilt. The first was this one:



Now I think of them as a quilt family. Cute, right?