Sticks and Stones - A Quilt of my Own Design

I am REALLY proud of this quilt, and I am really excited to share it with you!  I spent a long time designing, cutting, sewing, quilting and binding this beauty, and I am so happy with the way it turned out!!

Quilting has been really fun for me over the last few of years.  Made even more fun by the fact that my mom has a long-arm quilting machine!  

After finishing up several antique quilt tops into quilts, I decided that I wanted to make a quilt, from the beginning, all myself!  

I really love many of the scrap quilts I've seen, and I needed to pare down my scrap pile, so I decided to create myself a pattern, and put together my own HST (half square triangle) scrap quilt!

Using triangle shapes in a powerpoint document, I started to arrange them, and came up with several different designs that I liked.  Below is the design I settled on.

Using this wonderful tutorial for making HSTs in bulk, I started the long process of sewing and trimming the hundreds of HSTs that I needed.  

I had quite a few blue and green scraps of fabric, so I arranged them according to those colors.

Then, I started laying out my quilt.

After I had my layout just the way I wanted it, I stacked the squares in each row, from left to right, and pinned them all together - including a piece of paper with the number of the row.  

That way, I was able to get it up off the floor, and keep it in order.

I sewed each square in the row together, as you see below.  It took a long time :)  I made sure to re-attach the number to the row once it was sewn together, so that I could remember the order.

You can see below I would check to make sure I had sewn things together correctly by laying each row side by side to look at the pattern again.  Once all the squares in each row were sewn together, I sewed the rows together.

I also used some HSTs to create a pattern for the backing.

Then, the fun (but stressful) part.  I agonized over what designs to quilt using the long-arm quilting machine.  I wanted the quilting to reflect the time I had taken to make it, so I was careful quilting it myself, and I spent a long time on it!  It was worth it!

I did swirls on the outer edge, pebbles in the squares, sunburst things in the pinwheels.  I did scallops between the zig zag border. 

Then I bound it with a bright color to complement the zig zag border.  I really LOVE how it turned out.  I'm willing to use most of the quilts I finish, but this one I've decided will just be for looking at, no for using :)

What do you think?  Are you a quilter?  Have you made your own pattern before?

It's a lot of work - but a ton of fun!

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