Turks! Stars!

After a lot of thought, I decided to try some turquoise diamonds. Or Aqua, I suppose. The new blocks are a very light blue green. I like the value of these - they aren't darker like the dark green or blue or red ones. I felt they fit in with the whole color story that was already going on. But no matter how much I pushed these turquoise diamonds around, they just didn't look right to me.

This layout, discovered at the last Scrap Slab Triangle class, was my inspiration. When I got up this morning and looked at my design wall, I realized I had strayed from my original idea. Maybe it was time to just give in.

A side story: At the end of the most recent bird class a few weeks ago at Quilted Threads, one student was designing her bird and was choosing fabric for the beak. She had a piece of blue fabric that neither her friend sitting next to her, nor I liked very much. We kept trying to offer her other options, but she kept coming back to the blue. After the fourth or fifth option, I put my proverbial foot down. "Nope. You've gone back to that same blue every single time. If it speaks that much to you, then you HAVE to put it in."  She did, and her friend and I agreed it was a good choice.

Sometimes things just CALL to you. I tell students "What the quilt wants, the quilt gets."

So it is with this. I decided to stop fighting my urge to make this quilt inspired by that original design and just go with it.

I removed all the turquoise (ok, I am going to settle on "aqua") diamonds and then just put it smack dab in the middle of a green diamond. I liked it. Then I started to arrange the diamonds around it.

I liked it, but I knew it needed more aqua...

 This was better, but then I looked at that circle of orange diamonds.  Hmm.  All the other colors are cool colors, which I really liked, but this put the emphasis on the orange. Before I committed to it, I had to try reversing the pink diamonds with the orange ones.

To me, this was clearly better. But then I looked at the edges, at the partial purple hex stars around the edges. I knew changes needed to be made there, but I had to work out the size first, so I got out my little sketchbook.

I think I might let the partial hex stars just fall away at the edges. I have to make some more purple scrap slab triangles, but that's not hard.




If you want to make a scrap slab triangle quilt, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away.