When Harry met...Jane?

 Project Quilting 14.4 continued

I had decided to use the Harry’s Star block for the 4^th Project Quilting Challenge this year.  The theme was “A Novel Project”, and the challenge was to use a novel that you had read as inspiration.  After many frustrating attempts, I gave up and made a potholder.  If you are interested, you can read about that fiasco a couple of posts back.  It's titled "Project Quilting 14.4 or How Harry Potter became The Last Unicorn."

Harry's Star block

Even though I was tempted to wad up the blocks and throw them in a corner,  at the end of the week I had cooled down a little.  I didn’t want to just abandon the blocks, but  also didn’t want to add to my pile of UFOs, so I continued to work on the blocks in the week between challenges.  Since the next challenge week was super busy again, I made another quick project and then got back to Harry, as I had started calling it.  

By the time I had all the blocks finished, I realized that there were 28 blocks, not 24 like I had originally calculated.  Harry was definitely a problem child!  The fat eight bundle that I used was called "Hello Jane" by Allison Harris, and it must have had more fat eights than I originally thought.  I had set aside two of the fat eights to cut up for the binding, and just made blocks out of the rest. In all the confusion and stress with trying to finish in time to use Harry as my entry for 14.4, I didn't realize that I would have more blocks than I needed if I used all the fat eights. 

After mulling it over,  I realized that having the extra blocks was a good thing. I had originally thought that I would have to cobble an extra block together out of the left overs from the other blocks in order to have my planned 40 inch square quilt.  Now that I had 28, that problem was solved. Having more blocks to play with actually worked out quite well. 

I arranged the blocks in a 5 x 5 straight set on my design wall.  During the next few days, every time I walked by, I would check to see if I liked the layout.  If two side by side blocks were too similar for my taste, or if  similar colors were too close together, I  switched blocks around, sometimes substituting one of the extras.  I wouldn't have been able to do that as well without the extras.

Once I was satisfied, I sewed the blocks together and considered what to do with the extras.  I could always throw them into my orphan block bin, but ultimately decided to use them on the back.  I pieced them into the backing in a diagonal row down the middle, then did a simple straight line diagonal quilting pattern.  The batting that I used says that you can quilt up to eight inches apart.  By starting a quilting line in every other square, the resulting diamonds are eight inches, point to point!  Harry was starting to behave! 

I cut each of the two set-aside fat eights into 4 strips, 2 1/4" x ~21" each, to use for the binding.   I sewed sets of matching strips together to make four binding pieces 2 1/4 X ~ 41".  Since Harry is 40" on each side, this was going to be tight!    I planned to use one piece on each side,  putting one color on the top and bottom and the other on the sides.  However, once I laid out the binding, I realized that there wouldn't be enough of an overlap at the corners to do the mitering.  Instead, I placed the color changes at the midpoints, and used straight seams instead of diagonal ones to join the binding strips so that the color change happens right at the centers.    It's easier to see what I mean on the back of the quilt.  If you look at the center top, you'll see that the binding changes color.  Likewise at the bottom, and on both sides.

Extra blocks set diagonally on the back 

'Harry', using Hello Jane fabrics by Allison Harris for Cluck Cluck Sew, Windham Fabrics

I've become quite fond of Harry.  Sometimes it is the 'problem children' that become the favorites, maybe because of all the trouble that they give us.  I think that Harry falls into that category!