Pinterest Challenge: Wild Hearts

It's only been two months since I mentioned wanting to try my hand at the Scrappy Little Heart Block tutorial from Kristan Kremer at Doodle Do Designs - and this week I finally went for it. 

It wasn't great timing to start a new project - I have so much already on my table - but I only have five bobbins that fit my machine (the shop told me that all the bobbins that came with it were wrong), and all five were filled with the wrong kinds of thread. One pink, one brown, one bright blue, one green, and one purple/aqua/pink. With an eye to emptying some of the bobbins from the ghosts of projects past, I pulled up the tutorial and went digging through my scrap piles. 

The tutorial was easy to follow - so easy that I didn't stop to take a single photo until the mini quilt I made with the blocks was done!

Although I do get a little twitchy looking at the places where the prints don't line up at all (so almost all of these hearts), I do like the 'big picture' view. But the solid purple is by far my favorite, despite being the one that didn't come from the scrap pile -- and I'm certain that a big part of that is because I don't get distracted by the pattern being so clearly interrupted. If the other hearts had been less obviously interrupted pattern I would have done additional quilting on each one, but as it looks now, I thought that only the solid heart could really take that much more attention. I also figured the pink quilting thread might work on some of the hearts, but it was not going to look very good against the green/aqua/orange or the red/yellow/orange blocks. If I had made each heart scrappy (as in the tutorial), this would probably all have been less of an issue. Next time I'll try it that way and see if my twitches are a little less for that. 

The backing didn't come from scraps -  but it did come from my stash. I have several yards of pink/skull fabric that I picked up in an early craigslist purchase (someone else cleaning out their stash). I have no idea what to do with any of it - but this one had pink and black, so I went for a little piece of it. Mini backs don't really have to coordinate since they're usually too small to really fold over or ever see the two sides together, but I wanted to bring together the black and pink since I knew I was still using up pink thread and would do the quilting in pink. I did throw in the purple/pink/aqua bobbin for the heart in-lining I did on the solid purple, then switched back to finish up the pink for the binding (the last remains of the binding I used on the Bluebird Park Star quilt). 

I enjoyed making the blocks - the tutorial makes it very easy, and very fast - but if I were going to do a larger scale project with these blocks I'd be more careful about my fabric choices. This is that kind of pretty/ugly a mosaic or collage can be, where the whole is kind of chaotic but pretty in a way that the individual pieces may not be when compared against each other. It's a little strange, but I think I like it. The fabrics were mostly chosen by what was around in the right sizes, but I like the usual combination of colors - especially the black background with an almost pastel green binding. 



Note: although none of these links lead to Pinterest, it was following links from Pinterest that brought me to this tutorial, and I did pin it to remind me to get back to it. Much as I love Pinterest, and oh do I, I am trying to make sure my links go to the appropriate material rather than to the pin (when possible).