Round Robin #7 - Sleeping Under the Stars

For several years now I've been thinking about making a quilt I saw in a magazine ad.  It's a beautiful quilt made with green batik fabrics.  It's shown hanging over a fence with a horse standing near by.  This quilt just spoke to me and I thought it would be perfect for my sister Sue.

Scraps from my very first quilt!

But with so many quilts on my to do list I didn't know if I'd ever get around to making it so I decided to use it for my Round Robin project.  It's a simple block that I hoped everyone would enjoy making.  I love that it would reveal a secondary pattern once the blocks and rows were sewn together.  


My color choice for the Round Robin was strictly influence by the need to reduce my stash!  I also wanted to find colors that the other girls would already have in their stashes.  I didn't want anyone to have to go out and buy fabric for this project.  And lastly the color choice was so I could put the quilt on our bed and not worry about the cats making it a cozy place for a nap.  ;o)

I was so intrigued by the pattern in that add.  It looks like pinwheels but it also looks like rail fence.  So how'd they do that?  I was hoping I could get a close up of it on the internet somewhere so I did some snooping and found it. What did we do before the internet?!

The block, as I said, is pretty simple.  It's a rail fence with a contrasting triangle added to two of the rails.  The key is to put the triangles onto the rails BEFORE making the block.  

Since I wanted the quilt to be scrappy I took some of each of the fabrics, made rails, then added triangles.  

This makes a cute block and doesn't require any matching of seams when you sew the blocks together until . . . 

. . . you put the ROWS together.  That's when you can see that the triangles are starting to create a secondary pattern.  So color choices are very important.  If the little triangles are too close to the color of the rails the pattern is not as obvious.  

Here's my original row.

And here's the piece after each of the other girls had added their rows.  They all did a great job!  I just love how the pinwheels are popping out from the rails.

My plan for this project is to create a queen sized quilt that I can use on our bed.  Finally I'll have a truly scrappy quilt.  Since the secondary pattern looks like little stars I've named my quilt "Sleeping Under The Stars".

I hope you'll come back and see the designed I've created for the final quilt!

Have you made any quilts with secondary patterns?