The Exploding Heart Quilt-Hawkeye Edition

 So, I've been working on this quilt pattern for quite awhile....It's been a really trendy pattern for while on the internets. I'm a little late to the party.....

Photo from Life of Pi

I decided to use Hawkeye fabrics in black, gold and gray.

The pattern calls for about a zillion of these-half square triangles, quarter square triangles and whatever 3 corner triangles are called. 

The little spinning four patch on the back is always cute. 

I've been sewing on this old lady. You might remember this is the one I saved from the dumpster over at DD's condo building. She does sew really nicely-but I miss the needle down and the thread cutter and all the bells and whistles. I took my modern machine in for annual service, so it's a vintage one for the time being. 

So after making 300 and some blocks, assembly begins. The pattern puts each entire row together than you connect the rows. I kept getting confused which row I was on, so I used a post it note to cover the other rows and split the row in to twosies, so I could chain peice.

See all those blocks stacked into their piles with a post it note label. Hard to believe they'll almost all be used. 

It's starting to come together, I seem to have neglected to take a picture of the rows coming together-I didn't lay the rows out ahead of time. I just selected the blocks from the piles required and stitched them together without previewing them at all--gotta have faith!

And here's the top all assembled. It'll need a good pressing that's for sure!

It's something like 74" square but I'm going to add a border maybe 3 or 4" all around. I don't like the idea of all those seams just hanging out there to come apart while quilting. 

And here we are spray basting out on the garage door.

I think it came out good.

Not too many places with the same colors next to each other. 

It took forever to make all those blocks.

Here's a link to the web page for  Slice of Pi Quilts. You can go see all the different ways folks have made them. I haven't seem many of them that used a print background fabric, but I like the look I achieved using this print background fabric.

And here's mine all finished. 

I used the curvy stitch to make curvy straight lines on the diagonal-only one way-to quilt ti. 

And you can see the gray swirly backing fabric.

And good looking corners too! I used black white & gold striped fabric for the binding. 

I took it outside this morning to try for some better shots of the whole thing. 

The tree in the backyard does pretty well to hold these bigger size quilts.

It finished at about 80" square. I'm glad I added the border-same as the background fabric-to the edges. Makes it a little bit bigger and seems more sturdy to me. 

I'm glad this one is done! I like it a lot, but will probably give it away for Christmas or something. 

And, by golly, it does look like the pattern!