I Heart America Quilt

You know how you really wanna share your work when you've done something that you're proud of... and your cat is just determined to get in the way? 

As a friend put it perfectly: "Cats are such jerks!"

Even the fact that I'd put my background fabric in backwards (wrong side out) and that my quilting lines looked like the drunken meanderings of a beer-swilling camel couldn't dampen my delight in this little number. 

I could see that I was going to be pleased with this piece almost from halfway through, and was so excited to share it with y'all! Even the binding came together perfectly from the original planning!

But the Jerk in question was determined to be in on the action! I wouldn't let her sit on it while I was putting the binding on, but she made sure to climb on it while I was trying to SEW the binding on. 

Jerk! 

Beloved Jerk, to be sure, but still a jerk! 😃

This pattern is called "I Heart America" and is a free pattern on Craftsy by Pretty Little Quilts. For some reason, this is not the pattern I used! Somehow I managed to get a different pattern with the same name and the same basic look... only the one on Craftsy looks easier, to be honest. The one I have does not identify its origin, so I draw a blank as to where it came from. The primary differences appear to be that my pattern specifies red and white fabric for the stripes, where the Craftsy one uses prints; and my one uses snowballing for the corners and the Craftsy one uses Half Square Triangles.

This was a stashbuster for me. I had a red and white jelly roll, and scrabbled for scraps for the blue of the flag, the blue of the background, and the striped border. The star was pieced out of one of the jelly roll white strips. The original pattern has a white background, but I saw another, similar pattern somewhere else that had a blue background and preferred it, so went with that. As mentioned, I accidentally put my background on backwards. The blue is darker and patterned, but once it was on and ironed open, I quite liked the paler hue and the muted pattern. So it stayed. The striped fabric was a real headache. It wasn't a neat square or rectangle. Instead, it looked like it was auditioning for a spot as a Rorschach test and getting two straight sections from in turned into an exercise in geometry! Although I didn't get the candy-pole effect I was after, I still like how it ended up.

The back was also stash. I didn't have a section large enough, but I did have enough to piece it together in two halves, and the print is so busy the join is almost invisible. Another win! The finished quilt is about 13" square-ish. I quilted in the ditch for the stripes, which look pretty good where I managed to stay in the ditch! Himself didn't like the star, so I used a cookie cutter as a template to draw a new star inside it, and then quilted it out in a shadow effect.

Overall, I count this one as a major success. It's a gift, and is already packed up for the Post Office. Oh... wait... Quality Control is gone! Here you are ... Ta Da!