Good Morning! If you are coming over from Facebook, Instagram of the Mystars blog WELCOME!!! I am going to chat a bit about my quilt in the book Optical Illusions Published by Kansas City Star Books. A group of really great quilters and I have designs inside. I feel like it has been ages since I made this quilt. But I guess that is how it goes in the quilting for publication world. I make a quilt, send it away and then get to working on other projects, quilts and designs and forget a bit about what is no longer on my design wall or in my stack of quilts waiting to be bound. In fact just the other day I was hunting through my fabric stacks looking for my Botanics fabric by Carolyn Friedlander. I knew I had bought quite a bit of it, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I knew that I have used it in quite a few projects, but surely I still had a couple yards somewhere! Then it dawned on me...it is in this quilt! My Tropical Storm quilt. So, when I was asked to submit an optical illusion quilt design idea I went first to Pinterest. If you have time to kill go ahead and do a search and see what pops up. A mind blowing collection of really bizarre pictures. Of all the Optical illusions that popped up the one that appealed most to me was the one above. I knew I would have a terrible headache if I tried to recreate it in a quilt, so I opted for a more simple and approachable design. Welcome Half Square Triangles! I did several water color sketches and settled on the one up in the sketchbook. As I was working with the fabric and scribbling out the instructions I felt the quilt needed a little pop to make it more like the quilts I make for myself and my family. So I pulled out some of my favorite fabrics and added tiny bits of them into the mix. Next came the quilting which is the best part! All the white triangles are quilted with straight diagonal lines and each colored segment is quilted different. This was a fun quilt to quilt after I sorted out what I wanted to do to it. Here is where all the Botanics went. I need to order some more I guess. OK, so I am going to give a book away! Please leave your email below or a comment with a link to your email in profile. That is it. I will choose a winner Sunday 21 September.
