Crazy Panes

I have just realized that I never posted my third quilt for Korea!

And here it is (with my usual crunchy-on-the-left photo taken in the breeze and rotated to the right)

The backing/binding are a very soft yellow fabric with a sweet little pattern which does not show up in the photos

While I was waiting for my daughter to cut the squares for the fourth quilt (long story on that one coming soon), I went to my box of 6-1/2-inch squares I am accumulating  and started playing around making 9-patch squares.  I had a bunch of fairly coordinated squares from projects I had worked on recently, so I just started putting them together to see what happened.  (In the end I bought two additional fabrics to finish my last two 9-patches.)  

After a while I had several squares and it started to become a serious quilt project.  In order to achieve the final size I wanted, I had to tie them all together with some strips.  In the end it looks rather like window panes--hence the name--crazy squares and window panes.

If I were setting out from scratch to make this quilt, I would have used more of the same squares to achieve a very unified look, but this was scraps so it became "crazy" 9-patches.

I laid it all out and believed I was sewing it together the way it was on my floor.  Then I layered it on the floor and pinned it in place for quilting.  Fortunately I did NOT begin the quilting stitching immediately.  Nor apparently, had I really LOOKED at my squares placement.

Later in the day I just happened to glance at it on the floor and a mistake in positioning two of the 9-patch squares fairly leaped out at me!  I couldn't believe I had missed it earlier!  (As my mom said when I told her, "It happens."   She has made 40-45 quilts--properly quilted by hand.)

So I had to un-pin the whole thing, remove the top, and disassemble a chunk from the middle.  (Remember it is all serged together--lots of fun when ripping stitches...)  Here is the hole it left

I took the two squares apart and reversed their positions.   I couldn't just reverse this section, because the one uniform thing I had done throughout was to make the diagonal from bottom left to top right in each 9-patch of the same fabric, as you see here.  So I had to take it apart to maintain the correct direction of my pattern.

Here it is--reassembled, re-smoothed, and re-pinned!  (Oh my aching knees!)   NOW I'm ready to run the quilting stitches.  If I had not discovered my error before the stitching was in place I would have felt really ill.  I would have left it that way and been very upset about it.

I had some difficulty in running the stitches.  I think part of it was the extremely soft backing, but later they discovered my needle position was not absolutely at the right place.  But finally it was all stitched and ready to do the binding.  I am again wrapping the backing over the front to form the binding. 

I rather like the end result of this spur-of-the-moment project.  And my half-Japanese/American cousin said, "It's Asian looking!"   I'm happy.