Mosaic

This is the one that got it all started working with batiks. It is a free pattern from Quilted Twins. They have a lot of really nice scrappy quilt patterns that are free to download. I am not sure what really drew me to this pattern of all they offered but it just did. I knew I had some batiks that I had not used in years, just didn't realize how many I really had. It is simple enough cutting, the bricks are 2 by 3.5 inches, using a 2 inch square to start and end every other row. There are 7 different row constructions, one and seven are not repeated but 2-6 are repeated backwards to make rows 8-12. I say backwards but I guess I mean inverted, example row 2 instructions are the same for row 12 and row 3 is the same for row 11. I pieced the first 12 rows and assembled them one row at a time

This was very time consuming and frustrating because it felt like it would take forever. This is probably why I ended up setting this one aside and doing the checkerboard one.

  It was easy to convince myself since I already had the batiks out and was still cutting the bricks for Mosaic that I could just as easily cut some one and a half inch strips to piece this one. And because I was able to put this one together in blocks which is something I am more comfortable with, it went together very quickly.

Batiks are still out on the cutting table when the Quiltmaker magazine came out featuring this one in batiks so you know how that story went. I even came up with a block to make from the cutoff of these spinning pinwheels.

Not to let this Mosaic pattern beat me I had to come up with some way of moving it along quicker. I realized that each row is not that hard it was just changing it every time, so repetition was the answer. The pattern is 5 and a half repeats of the first 12 rows, so since I had one section done I new I needed  4 and a half more repeats. So since row 1 was not repeated I would only need 5 more of them and making 5 in a row of the same thing went a lot faster since I didn't have to think so much about it. Now row 2 and 12 were the same so I would need 9 repeats of that instruction. This really sped things up. I would put each group of the same row in their own container.

I now have all the individual rows finished, waiting to be assembled. However I am again going to have to set these aside to make a baby quilt for a customer, but when I am able to get back to it, it should go together quickly.

Happy Stitching,
Teresa