New Orleans House Project

Monday, June 20, 2016

Scrappy Red, White & Blue

Since I had an unexpected all-day sew-a-thon on Saturday due to rainy weather, one project that got some attention was a scrappy red, white & blue Scrap Jar Star quilt.  I started cutting up scraps and piecing the 16-patch centers last July, but the project got stalled after I pieced a huge batch of HSTs to form the Sawtooth Star portion of the block.

For past SJS blocks, I made totally scrappy stars, pairing fabrics for the star points, but using different fabrics for each set of points.  To my dismay, that really didn't work with all the RWB prints.  The resulting stars were just way too busy and jarring to look at.

Since I already had a huge pile of HSTs made, I decided to make the star points match on each block in an effort to tone down the craziness.  I also decided to use consistent fabrics for the corner squares in each block.
I'm happier with the result, but it's still on the busy side.  The 16-patch centers don't look like they belong.  I'm not crazy about the center fabric for the secondary 9-patch where the block corners meet, either.  That will probably be easy to fix.  I'm not sure about the SJS blocks themselves.  I'm going to leave them pinned to the design wall for now and see if they grow on me.  Since I only have 4 blocks pieced so far, I figure it would be easy to swap out the 16-patch centers with a simpler block (pinwheel?) and go from there.

Any thoughts or ideas cheerfully accepted!