A Thousand Pyramids - give or take

So, in between not packing up my apartment and trying to rule Tetris Worlds, I have actually done one productive thing. Inspired by a painting at the Portland Art Museum (no picture unfortunately) and all the trees that I drive through, I finally put together a Thousand Pyramids quilt.

Here's ever helpful Sally, carefully applying a layer of cat hair for extra warmth.


I've had this quilt in mind for a long time (I posted about seeing a similar one at the 2007 Sisters Quilt Show) and started buying fabrics for it a year or two ago. I only got down to actually making it when I found out a knitting friend was going to have a baby. She had really good timing! After last year's summer-o-baby-quilts, I'd put a moratorium on giving away any quilts until I'd made a few for myself. But since I'd made a few quilts for myself by the time she announced she was expecting, I was ready to get back into baby-quilt making.

I didn't take too many in progress pictures. But here it is all finished up.
Here's a closer shot to show off the fabrics, and also a tiny bit of embroidery I did in one of the triangles.
The outline of Oregon with a green heart in the middle is an uber-popular bumper sticker here (I just stuck one on my laptop) and I know that the mom-to-be really likes it, so I thought that would be a nice touch to this very Oregon-inspired quilt.

Overall it ended up being a bit more blue than I had intended... but I only used about a third of the fabrics I'd bought for this project. Which is just fine... because that means I've still got more than enough to make myself a bed-sized quilt out of it.

What I love about this pattern is the way the triangles all line up....you really can see thousands (or at least hundreds) of different pyramids layered and overlapping. It's a very cool pattern. I also love all these batiks and think they work pretty well together.

This was the first time I ever pieced triangles. In my flying geese & broken dishes quilt, the triangle shapes are made from sewing together either two squares or two squares and a rectangle. It took me a bit to wrap my brain around it... I think I just offset each piece by 1/4 inch when I sewed them together. Not all of the points match up exactly, in fact several are just kinda squished together... but mostly I think they look okay. I took the good advice from M5K to quilt straight lines 1/4 inch outside the ditch... and I think that helped disguise some of my less well formed triangles. Or at least it didn't emphasize problem areas the way stitching in the ditch would have. In fact I think the diagonal lines, while basic, are a good choice for this pattern. I made one major 'mistake' in this quilt. I'd intended to alternate the batik triangles with black triangles so the top and bottom rows would be more jagged instead of flat. But I'm not that great at following directions... not even my own... and didn't notice that I'd forgotten that part until the top was finished. Oh well, I got the sides right!


The baby-shower was Saturday (which is why I finally get to post about it!), and the mom really liked it. She's very sweet and was touched that people made stuff for her (she also got a hand knit sweater, and a hand knit cabled blanket)... she *almost* cried, but managed to keep herself together. It was precious. So I know this quilt will be well loved and used - which makes *me* really happy! So I'll call this one a success.