Boy did I have fun making this quilt! I have been busy this year working on lots of projects related to my upcoming book. I have enjoyed doing all of that too, of course, but this quilt was exclusively creative play for me. I try to intersperse work projects with creative play projects like this. It helps me to achieve a healthy balance.

I am calling this quilt Deception because the original block design is based on a spider web. You can find the 12″ version of this block in my shop. As I made the quilt, I was thinking of the words of Sir Walter Scott, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” So true!

This is how I envisioned the quilt. It’s lap size here. But while it was hanging on my design wall, I took a close up shot at an angle, like we do, and was struck by how much I preferred the blocks on point! When the blocks were turned on point, the seam lines seamed to just disappear and the composition looked so much less block based.

I took a deep breath, and I cut an on point square from the original square quilt top. It did pain me to see all the piecing cut off but this is where I was happy that I wasn’t making a pattern or a quilt that needed to measure a particular bed size and so I was able to take this risk.

I found use for some of the pieces that I cut off by turning them into the binding. I love that it is pieced like this rather than framing the design. It was difficult to sew such a heavily pieced binding but I don’t regret it.

The new, smaller quilt size of approximately 37 1/2″ square, allowed me to quilt more intensely than I might have on a larger quilt. I used an Aurifil thread that was a pretty close match to the lighter color in my piecing and made a regular/irregular diagonal grid. The lines are 1/4″ – 1/2″ apart. I love the texture it created.

Thank you to those of you who followed this quilt’s journey on Instagram. I wish you could all see it in person because I couldn’t get the color to read accurately in the pictures and ultimately gave up. The lighter pink is actually darker and a little more apricot.