Jewel Box quilt top together!

Well, I can't believe it, but I've finally finished the top to my Jewel Box quilt. I'm debating on adding a one-inch border of that navy blue, or I may just save that matching navy fabric and do a binding with it instead.

I went to a quilt retreat this weekend, and after making some fold-and-roll totebags, I worked on this Jewel Box. I've had it two-thirds done since July of 2008.


It's king sized - 108 inches square, to fit my waterbed. There are more than 3700 pieces in it, squares and triangles. I don't know how many fabrics there are, but a LOT. :D All the navy blue is the same, but there are about 6 different tone-on-tones for the white. Countless different fabrics in the bright squares and triangles. There are some duplicates, but not too many!

You're never quite sure if what you draw in EQ will look the same when it's translated to fabric, but I think this time, it's very close. Here's the original design I did on EQ of what I wanted it to look like:



Back in May of 2008, all those little squares looked like this. If you're interested in how I went from the EQ design to construction of the quilt, here's my instructions, with graphics. For those of you who like to count, there's 2592 squares in this quilt, 1160 triangles, 36 rectangles (in blue, to piece the border) for a grand total of 3788 pieces.

Visit with Schnoodle!

I stumbled on a quilting blog about a month ago, I guess, and added it to my list to check every few days. Lindsay has a block-a-day quilt calendar, and has been actually MAKING every block on the calendar, one per day. In some cases, she's sticking pretty close to the colors given in the calendar, and in others, she's experimenting and changing colors up. There's a lot of inspiration here.

Pause here, and go look at SCHNOODLE! and scroll down to see the collages she's made of her completed blocks to date. Also note her Milky Way block for Saturday, July 19. She didn't like this one, but I had to go put it in EQ and see what it'd look like on point. Here it is in the colors she made it with:


Then I set it horizontally, but did each star in a different color. I kinda like this one, but something about it reminds me of barbed wire, so I put it against a pale pink background. Pale pink not being something you'd think of with barbed wire:


And then I had to see what it'd look like against navy blue instead of pale pink. The deep purple stars didn't show, so I swapped them for pink and added some pale orange. It would be a pain to make unless you had a design wall, but I really like the woven star look:


Sometimes playing with EQ is just as addictive as a computer game. ;)

434

I was going to just post the number... 434, and get back to sewing, but I'd been showing people at work the EQ pattern I put up way back in December, and got tired of having to go back in the archives to show the bright scrappy one, and explaining that the version Mom had decided on would be done less colorful, only in blues and beiges.

So, here's a blue-toned EQ version of where all 576 (if I ever get done with them) half square triangles will end up:



I've also got one kaleidoscope block done, and ten more cut out. Back to sewing!