Can I Get A Whoop Whoop? Stained Glass at Night...

Hi, all!

Can you believe it's already Friday again?  It's hard to believe the week has passed by so quickly - - - but you know what that means! It's time to get our whoop whoop on!  Are you ready?

Today I want to share a project I worked on last week before I got the little girls (and all sewing time went the way of the dodo bird...)

It all started with sixteen of these little beauties - paper pieced courthouse steps/log cabin blocks made by Sharon of Vroomans Quilts.  Aren't they gorgeous!  

This was my original thought - to lay them out in an X design on a black field.  But then...

...I started fiddling around with them on point, and came up with this modified granny square design.  The four blocks in the center were already assembled, with the tiniest little black strips and an itty bitty cornerstone joining them.  It is truly amazing, but I am not patient enough to replicate that kind of work.....  So I grabbed a bolt of Kona black and starting assembling the blocks into a quilt.

After some serious pedal to the metal time, this was the result.  I showed it to my husband and told him it would have black triangle corners to finish it up into a square.  My husband looked at it and said, "If you put black on the corners, you're going to have an awful lot of black!"  Well, yeah.....

...but he made me start wondering if it would be too much black.  So I turned it the other direction (not on point) and took a pic to see if I liked it.  Being, as usual, unable to decide, I put it on Instagram for a quick powwow with some other quilters, and the on-point design won, hands down!

So I added the corners.  That was a tricky proposition - I didn't have enough black left to make full-sized corners (which I realized after cutting the first two!) but the quilt was going to turn out larger than I wanted anyway, so I made a smaller set for the third and fourth corners and trimmed the first ones down to match.  I think it now measures about 66" square.

And look how gorgeous it looks with the sun shining through!  Although those beautiful blocks glow a good bit on their own, as you can see from the studio shot above this one.

Because of the way it glows, I'm calling it 

Stained Glass at Night.  

It was originally intended to be a ministry quilt, but I think it will serve another purpose that I can't reveal yet.  I'll work up a ministry quilt out of my stash to "repay" for the orphan blocks that form the basis of this one.  

As far as quilting goes, I'm thinking of using a "zentangle" type of quilting in all that black negative space, using a glossy black thread.  The backing is going to be a rich reddish purple artists' canvas type print.  The binding will probably be either black or scrappy - I can't decide on that yet, and would welcome any suggestions!

I'm also hoping that my class with Judi Madsen in Paducah this weekend will give me mad quilting skills and uber-inspiration for a great design on this quilt!

And here's one more thing we're whooping about around here this week...

So - - - can I get a Whoop Whoop?

*&*&*&*&*&*&*

And now it's your turn!

What are you whooping about this week?

What's got you dancing the happy dance?

Share - we want to dance right along with you -

Because it's always more fun to dance with friends!

Remember - it doesn't have to be a finish - 

just something that makes you happy!

The party will stay open until Sunday at midnight.

Hope to see you there!

Hugs!

Sarah