Wonkiness

Last summer I finally fell to the sirens' call of Wonky Stars. At least, I bought in to the idea of making them, and dug a bunch of neutral 2.5"x4.5" pieces from my Scrap User System's 2-1/2" box. To those I added all the small and dark triangles from my triangle box, and there they sat at the side of my sewing table, ignored, for several months.

As whims do.

The Shoo-Fly Leader-Ender project had stalled because I still needed to cut more pieces for the negative color blocks, so last month while assembling the QAYG behemoth and completing the first steps of fourteen Embryonic Pod Things, I started grabbing these for my leader-enders.

Before too long, I had something to trim down and play with.

Lots of that people-and-flowers print scraps from this project.

Up on the design wall, quick! I wanted to see how things would look as soon as I could.

Not bad, not bad...but how's about I fill in those squares with some more scraps?

Now the stars are starting to pop!

But what to do about that negative space? Big squares of a single neutral? It doesn't look all that interesting with the plain white, and I couldn't imagine any other plain would be any more inspiring.

On a whim I pulled out the bundle of 5" string neutral squares I had left over from another quilt

and added some of them to the mix. Et voila! By George, I think she's got it!!

Yep, those 5" squares are all going to have to be trimmed down. Oh well!

I can already see a star point that needs replacing, but for the most part I'm excited about this one. The number of string blocks will dictate the size of this top. It'll probably be based on a 7x9 placement, with maybe four more string blocks placed in border corners? There's still lots of time to play with ideas.

This week I cut the pieces for 20 more Shoo-Fly blocks, so that project is underway again as well. Off to the sewing room I go!

Update, 9 pm
In the sewing room I played with my graphics program and came up with this plan:

There's some room for border manipulation, and perhaps another row of rectangles along the right edge. Regardless, it's a start and a pretty cool looking top. It'll be interesting to compare this plan to whatever ends up under the needle this summer.

Also, it feels SO GOOD to be typing "2020" now! I always feel better in easily-divisible years.

Edit 9/2022: SERIOUSLY rethinking that sentiment!