Leftovers again

I took a break from the hand quilting to use up some leftovers.  You may remember that I severely over-bought fabric when I was considering changing the dark squares on the Desert Rose quilt.  My original plan was to make 3 giant Ohio Stars with the extra.  Then I realized that I had an abundance of what had been the corner blocks which when joined this way made some dandy 6" green squares.  I decided to keep the stars in proportion with the green squares so they finished at 18".   The pinwheels and squares on point were some leftover HST proving that I can't count when following my own directions.  The varigated looking stripe was made from the stripset remains from the Desert Rose star.  The checker board section is my least favorite, but a quick way to use up the abundance of squares from when I thought I was going to change to the mid brown.  Then I used up the over-cut strips.  And I added some dark brown and lime strips from the stash to balance things out.  This went amazingly fast, a couple hours at a time over the course of a Saturday doing other things.

I spent more time designing a terribly intricate quilting pattern.  I trolled my Pintrest collection of amazing machine quilting and borrowed ideas from multiple people.  Unfortunately, this needs to look symmetrical and the components are repeated 4-8 times in each of 3 blocks.  So I proceeded to work out some rather complex templates.  The star section needed 3 different ones, flipped front to back in order to transfer the whole design.

While my FMQ skills are improving, I was pretty concerned about if I was going to be able to pull off the plan.  I drew up one more to do a test piece.  I am pretty pleased with the feathers.  The pebbles are a little organic, but tolerable.  I need more practice on the swirlies.  And I realize that I will never be able to FMQ a straight line even when it's drawn.  I know there are people who use a ruler for that even with a domestic machine.  I'm not sure I'm that coordinated.

This sample used some wool batting so it has some lovely loft.  The final quilt will have cotton batting, so some of the imperfections with wrinkle away with the shrinkage.

I am hoping to get all more chores and errands done quickly today so I can get started on the quilting.