March's Quilt Day

Have you thought I forgot about my resolution to have a monthly quilt day? I did miss in February because it conflicted with the Olympics. But I made sure to get right back at it this month.

I debated what to do, and decided to work on the square for the raffle quilt at the County Fair. I [naively] thought it would be a nice project that would yield a finished project in one day.

I threw around some ideas for the block on the theme of "Spirit of America" in this post, and liked the suggestions I got. While fooling around with some ideas, I kept coming back to the same one.

The first thing I did today was draw it out. It's a foundation paper-pieced block so I had to draw the foundation. I thought that part would be a lot harder than it was. I didn't have a compass for the curves, but a pencil on a string worked quite well.

I was pretty pleased with the results, but considering it was a new design it occurred to me that I should probably play it safe and try it out with "scrap" fabric before I used my limited required county fair fabrics.

So I found some tissue paper, ironed it straight, and traced the design.
I won't get into details on paper piecing again (look here for previous instructions), but at the end of a couple hours I had the following block:
Not bad, eh? And I must ask, does it remind you of anything? I'm kind of hoping it will. Leave a comment and let's see if you can recognize it.

It seems amazing to me that I actually got a finished block that I like from a rough sketch like this I made while working the ideas out:
You know, "I can't draw." But maybe I would have been good at drafting...

Anyway, now that I've done a practice square and have learned a few things (and like a good girl took some notes to tuck away with the materials), I am ready to do the "real" thing with the required fabrics.
When I looked at them again today, I realized just how small those pieces are. (14" square for the background fabric and 10" square for the rest.) With the way I want to use the colours, I think I'll have enough of all of them except maybe the background fabric.

I'm going to have to make paper templates of all the pieces I need and lay them out on the fabric to make sure there's enough. If there's not, it's back to the drawing board!