Vomit Quilt

 Starting in September of 2012, the Payson Quilt Guild did a 5" vomit swap. Marion got the idea here. The idea was to bring together the ugliest fabrics we had to make a really scrappy quilt. Hence, the idea of a "vomit" quilt. I loved this idea, but I really wanted to try something that wasn't squares (remember, I like difficult) if I could find something that jumped out at me.

So I was looking through some older quilting magazines my mom sent me, and came across a really pretty blue and yellow pineapple in the October 2005 edition of American Patchwork & Quilting. I loved the colors and planned on doing it in some variant of blues and yellows. I have always been a BIG fan of blue, particularly dark blue. Then I saw the color variation option, and fell in love with the pattern all over again. The way it was done looked like a bunch of X's (as pictured). I thought this could be a really good scrappy quilt if you focus on the X's.

I checked the fabric requirements and found that all of the triangles are made from either 2" squares or 2.5" squares. This meant that I could get 4 out of each 5" square. If each of those 4 squares were placed in a coordinating location I could make the X's out of 5 coordinating large squares. Now to sort out the middles. I worked through the neutral palettes and settled on the most basic connections, black, white and grey. After seeing the variant in the magazine, I thought it would be great to variegate the colors from light to dark. This then left the centers for which I thought black would be just dandy.

Now the project has been started, and after the 1st block I am thrilled to say the colors are looking even better than I had originally hoped. I now have 8 of the 72 blocks done. It was at about block 5 that I realized that some of my block sizes had varied (seems odd to me since I was using the same thread, same foot, and same machine, but hey I think we can fix this). At this point, I think to fix this I will use a black to bring all of the blocks to the same size before piecing them together in the end. But that's still a few blocks off.