Shattered Kites - Blogger's Quilt Festival

I'm entering Shattered Kites as my second entry in this fall's Blogger's Quilt Festival for the Scrappy Quilt category.  Regular readers have seen it before (bear with me one more time!).

Last year I decided I wanted more rulers than just my plain straight ones.  I bought a kite ruler because it seemed more versatile than an equilateral triangle (which I wanted).  It sat amongst my boring rulers for nearly a year - then this the summer I began a crumb quilt.  I decided making kite-shaped crumb blocks would look really cool.

Before squaring

I went online to get some ideas of patterns I could use, but I found very few examples that used this ruler.  So I played around with the kites I had cut.  I started with lines of kites, but that seemed too neat and orderly.  After playing with the pieces for a while, I came up with this design.  I added half-inch sashing so the pieces didn't blend all in together.  The narrow yellow sashing broke up the blocks nicely.

The pattern (if you can call it that) repeats on an angle.  I realized the quilt was going to have very rough edge.  No way I was going to attempt binding it like that.  I figured I could square it, but did not want to cut any of my beautiful crumb kites.  So I added some light green around the edges.  It took a while to figure how to square something this size and cut it.

I thought any of the free-motion patterns I knew would be too busy for this quilt.  It already had enough going on!  I wanted to do something more interesting than stitch-in-the-ditch; I landed upon 1" wide straight-line quilting.  I lined it up with one cluster of kites and worked out from there.  I like how it accentuates the angles.

The quilt has corner pockets on all four corners so it can be hung with any side as the top (although it has a very clear This Way Up for me).  Right now I have a wonderfully large wall to hang it on, but I figured it may need to be hung portrait-style if we move to a smaller place.

I submitted Shattered Kites to the Topsfield Fair; it received a second prize ribbon.  I always lose points for my corners!  One of these years I will bind a perfect corner... but I still haven't figured that out.  Regardless, I'm thrilled to have placed in the fair and I love this quilt, blunt corners and all.

It was a tough choice between the Original Design category or Scrappy, but I decided you can't get much scrappier than this.

Blogger's Quilt Festival Stats
Quilt Measurement:  34.5" x 30.5"
Technique:  machine pieced and quilted with walking foot
Category:  Scrappy Quilts

Be sure to check out the other great quilts at the Blogger's Quilt Festival!