❤️ Day 14: Mosaic Crazy Quilt

This wall quilt is a fast fun afternoon project inspired by a favorite book and the incredible quilts created by Heidi Proffetty.

Early in my quilting days, I discovered this book-

…which I found to be a great way to begin to learn how to construct crazy quilts. The concept is that you stack your fabrics, make cuts, then re-arrange the order in each little ‘deck’…next, take the each new layer and lay them out to become a block.

I used Windham Fabrics’ blender collection and pulled black for a background, then 8 Valentine’s shades to create the faux blocks. Because, hey, if I can fuse instead of piece, I will 😉! MistyFuse all, fuse black to a piece of batting and backing (here, an 18″ square but you could size up or down), then fuse and trim the colors to 5″:

Next, stack together, aligning all edges, and make 7 cuts at random to create 8 little stacks:

Note that the number of colors needs to equal the number of blocks. In this piece I wanted to leave the center alone to leave space for a 💜, hence 8.

Now, leave one stack alone…in the next, put one color in the back…the next, 2 colors in the back, and so forth, until you see all 8. This is easier seen than described:

Now, carry these carefully to your background sandwich (I used a small 6″ ruler) and arrange a layer in 8 roughly-square areas around the center. I am a HUGE fan of Heidi Profferty’s work (if you are not familiar with this star quilter, here is her website: https://www.heidiproffetty.com/ ) and decided to let the black background act as the ‘grout’ for a mosaic layout:

I decided to let mine be a little wonky. Alternatively, you could use a chalk pencil and neatly mark out the 8 square areas.

Yay! Now cut a red heart out for the center (you could cut out red lips too ;)) and center it.

Grab your Goddess sheet and fuse all in place. Ready to stitch:

Hmm, heart too big? Yes…the joy of MistyFuse is that you can reposition! I peeled off, trimmed down a bit and re-fused. Heidi stitches her amazing quilts with monofilament thread, so I thought I would try that (excellent stippling practice!) on all pieces except the heart (which I outlined with a pretty shade of Aurifil). When you’re finished quilting, trim and finish with a zigzag stitch and black piping.