Mariner's Compass Quilt Progress

Well my Mariner's Compass quilt was my August project but is now also my September UFO project! Luckily my UFO project (No. 5 this month) is only to make some 'crumb' blocks from my tiny scrappy bits and they are not urgent at all.

I have made some progress already as I had some blocks cut out ready to sew at the end of last month so I look like I've really been working hard!  I now have all my block centres done ready to frame up.

I've already shown you this one, I have four of these:

I've also done four of these. I tried the split points on these.

The background fabric on the ones above is a map of the world and the lighter fabric in the split star is London themed. I'm making this quilt for my brother and he likes to travel, his daughter is currently living in London and he loves the sea and sailing. I'm trying to get the feeling of the seaside in these blocks. I thought the dark blue fabric reminded me of the ocean.

These next four are similar but two have the dark blue blades and two have chocolate brown, with each block having a different contrasting set of points. The first has wavy lines which feel nautical to me.

This one has fabric with passport stamps on it:

Here it is in close up, isn't it great?!

This one's contrast fabric reminded me of seaweed.

The last one has the weathered wood I used in the first blocks I made. I'm trying to tie the blues and browns in the quilt together. I really love the blue fabric in the centre of each of these blocks, looks like ocean waves to me and reminds me of a photo my auntie had on her wall when I was young. I know my brother loved that photo too so I hope he'll see the connection.

The background fabric on these blocks reminds me of some of the seaweed we get at the beach some times, which kind of looks like little elongated berries.  The fabric these are resting on will be used to frame all the blocks to make them square, it reminds me of wet sand.

And now for my centrepiece extraordinaire! Ta da!

I threw in the extra points on this one as it will be right in the centre of the quilt. Its not quite perfectly matched in the centre as I had two sets of two matching pieces and instead of sewing them opposite each other as I intended, I ended up with them next to each other. Sigh! I just can't bring myself to unpick them and redo it so I'm hoping he won't notice if I don't point it out!

This fabric was one of my original inspirations for this quilt but I don't have enough to make four more blocks using it. I do have another set of background wedges in the map fabric cut out so I might just make another blocks using the feature fabric and make a cushion for him for Christmas perhaps.

Its a little hard to picture without the blocks being framed up but I'm planning a layout similar to this.

I didn't quite have enough room on the bed to lay it out properly!

This weekend I'm off to Wallaroo for a sewing weekend and once I have quilted another project I hope to get the frames on all these blocks at the same time as teaching my bestie how to quilt. Hmmm we'll see how that goes!

Thanks for visiting today,