Project Snap And Quilt: Aztec Disasters and Rainbow Grass

Yesterday was really busy for me so by the time I had a chance to do my #projectsnapandquilt I was exhausted and grumpy. Which obviously reflected in my work.
I mentioned before that this was a "warts and all" kind of project so I guess that was a "warts" day. :P

I started with a snap of the pattern from my daughter's jeans, which I love and thought would be easy to turn into a quilting pattern. Wrongitty wrong wrong wrong! It might have just been my grumpiness, or the fact that the kids were also over-tired and squabbling while I was trying to work but I just wasn't feeling anything. Here's what I ended up with.

Straight lines are hard!

Quilting was even worse. Instead of enjoying it (which is really what this is supposed to be about), I was just trying to get it done so I could cook dinner, which is a terrible way to try and be creative!

This was the first thing I did. In hindsight, I probably should have stopped there. :P

It's actually not that bad a design, I just couldn't get my head around it last night.

The next one I tried wasn't working at all. I kept getting lost so I started to draw the design on the fabric, before I realised that wasn't very free motion of me. :D

So I scrapped that idea and went back to the drawing board. 

I love this design but I was in a hurry and messed it up in many ways. One half has one less repetition, even!

That was last night. Today I went back to it, because I was determined to do it right. I did the spiky diamond design right over the top of the previous abandoned one so I didn't waste any fabric. 

This time I drew two intersecting lines from corner to corner in an 'X' shape to guide me and it worked out so well that I'm now dreaming up a quilt set on point with loads of diamond shaped negative space to fill with it. :D

By the way, those white-ish lines are what was left behind by the Frixion pen after I ironed. Sometimes they just don't want to go away, which is why I now stick to chalk for real quilts.

I also went over the other shape from last night, just using the one shape for all quadrants and I like it a great deal better. It's a good shape.

 Here's what it looks like from the back now. The red thread I used today kind of knotted up in every spot where I paused to make my points more defined. I think it might be because I used a smaller weight thread in the bobbin (the red thread was 30 weight), and I also forgot to change my needle to a larger one which probably didn't help. :P

Okay, I'm glad that's over! I seriously contemplated not showing most of that because it's kind of embarrassing, but I think it will be more encouraging to anyone reading to see all my mistakes and not have me just gloss over them. Don't grump and quilt, people! :D

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Today's snap is a clump of grass. Umm, yay? :P

I liked the way the grass just grows every which way, and it looks almost like quilt texture already so I thought it would be fun, I started drawing long spiky triangles, travelling back along the lines to "sprout" another blade, just keeping building more spiky blades of grass.

My day needed brightening up, so I used a multicoloured variegated thread to quilt it. 

I haven't taken a picture of the back yet, because it's still on my machine. I'm going to go back and scribble out some more pointy rainbow blades of grass later. This will be a good filler for when I want to flatten out a part of a quilt to make an adjacent part pop out more. It's not terribly original but it sure is a blast!

-Strange.