One Hundred Fourteen

These are the leftover giant diamonds from all the diamond quilts I have made. There are 114 of them. There may be duplicates.

I can tell you all have an idea where this is going. Let me tell you how the idea got started.

AS USUAL, it started with a conversation with my best pal, Julie. She had remarked that I should make a quilt of all my leftover zebra blocks. I replied that I hadn't kept any of them from the first one, Parade of Zebras, (the scrappy version.) Why not? I couldn't remember. But I had a ton of big diamonds, I told Julie. So one thing led to another.

THE QUESTION IS... Can I make a quilt (a decent one, not just a bunch of scraps sewn willy-nilly) using ONLY the 114 diamond blocks in the photograph above.

I already know that you guys are thinking, "Well if anybody can do it, Lynne can..." which is a very nice thought, and certainly a challenge, and the answer is, I dunno, we'll have to see.

So after I finish sewing the Firebird quilt top together (I have 3/4 of the top sewn. I didn't sew all day yesterday. I was reading The Children Return, Bruno Chief of Police #7 from Martin Walker and I wanted to finish it.) I am going to spread the diamonds around and see what happens.

Since I don't like to make two quilts that are the same, this ought to be interesting. My Number One Rule will be to use THOSE DIAMONDS and ONLY those diamonds. I am not going to allow myself to cut one piece of fabric.

We'll see how long that lasts.

Yeah, I know. (Rules are made to be broken and all that crap.)

Tangram

Remember the game Tangram?

My sister had it on her Kindle Fire and I thought it looked fun so I downloaded it to mine and started playing.

It's a puzzle game, and you make different shapes and configurations using the seven flat shapes (called "tans".)

 So I started playing,

and in no time at all I was filling shape after shape, most of them in less than a minute. I finished up the "geometric shapes" and moved on to animals.

Those weren't very hard either, and the thing that aggravated me the most was flipping the yellow parallelogram. It kept getting stuck, and cost me valuable seconds. Heck, I wanted to see if I could solve one in less than 30 seconds (So far my record is 26. They're not all that easy. Some have taken me as much as ten minutes.)

Then I started thinking, "This is lame. It isn't even HARD! How come it is so easy for me? I look at the shape and know quickly how to arrange the pieces, but more importantly, I already understand the relationship of the shapes to each other?  Why is that?

Well, the answer was pretty obvious once I thought about it. These are really nothing more than combinations of variously sized HST's, and as a quiltmaker, I'm intimately familiar with how they work together.

I'm going to continue working my way through them, even though they aren't much of a challenge any more, but seeing the various ways these seven shapes can make various cats, dogs, birds and other animals is a great resource for making free pieced animals. I don't have to make them exactly like the puzzles in the game, but it's a great place to start experimenting.

You know how I keep saying you never know where you'll find inspiration? Well you never know where you'll find a good idea either, or a good resource!