Streak of Lightning - Adrian's Quilt

Design original, inspired by a photograph of a vintage quilt, my entry in the Michael Miller fabric challenge for the Modern Quilt Guild, 2014. Welcome gift for my first niece, Adrian.  

This quilt was so, so many tiny half-square triangles. Since it was a fabric challenge, we got the printed fabrics free, so long as we used them in the projects we made. It also means I ran out of fabric to make more HSTs, so the size of this baby quilt was determined by when I ran out of fabric. It also affected the design, as you can see, where the streaks end. When I also ran out of the Coral color (I did buy more of that beautiful solid, a perfect orangey-pink), I played with the basic premise of a quilt as having four corners and four sides. Why not five sides?

I spent some time with free motion quilting on this one, branching out from my favorite and usual straight-line quilting. My mom and I worked on it over Fourth of July weekend 2014, and in a very quick and terrifying moment, with everything moving so fast, that I impaled my finger, broke the needle off inside my finger, thread and all. Quilter's rite of passage, right? Thankfully my mom was there, because I was in panic, and she grabbed some pliers and pulled the needle out from the soft side before we took a full look at the giant hole and crack going through the fingernail side. Scary! For a few days it hurt and all I could think was that tiny pieces of needle were floating in there, but it was all in my head.