Drunkard's Path + Mosaic blocks
size: 37" x 48"
The Drunkard Path blocks were leftover from the border of my Celtic Lone Star quilt. The mosaic blocks were leftover from an aborted layout that never materialized. They have nothing in common, except being the same size, but as they lay on my cutting table, next to each other, they didn't look so bad. I just needed something to pull it together.
You might notice that although the mosaic blocks are all the same final size, they are not all the same scale. The center mosaic block has bigger individual squares than the others. The top row of one of them is about 3/4's size. But it all looks fine.
So, I framed them with a narrow black border and pulled a dark green (it really *is* dark green) print from my stash as an oversized border, in order to make the quilt the appropriate size.
Originally, I had thought to do a feather design in the border, but since I had just done that on a previous charity quilt, I didn't want to repeat it. Instead, I picked a "ribbon curl" design from Suzanne Early's book, "Meandering Magic", which is an awesome, AWESOME spiral-bound book on meander quilting waaaay beyond the basic (and boring) meander. You'll wonder why you never came up with these variations! :-)
Because I was doing this particular design for the first time ... this is also a practice quilt, remember? ... I did this quilting in black thread, specifically because it would NOT show up against the dark fabric. If my practice turned out horrible, I didn't want it showing (too much). However, Suzanne's drawings make this a VERY easy meander to do. As a concession to my intial foray, I did chalk in a wavy "spine" in the middle of the border so that I would make the curve into the corners properly. I'm not quite confident enough to do that on the fly. The chalk will easily wash out when I launder it.
In the narrow, inner black border, I used my now-all-time-favorite sashing, Carla Barrett's Swirly design for borders and sashing.
As for the center medallion of Drunkard Path and Mosaic blocks .. I used two different designs. In the Drunkard's Path blocks, I used a flower petal and spikes sort of thing. I treated the Mosaic blocks as a giant 9-patch and did a continuous Orange Peel design. Both of these designs were also done in the black thread.
I learned the road map for doing the continous Orange Peel from a tutorial by Carla Barrett but here's my graphic for it. 
All in all, I'm rather pleased with the way this quilt turned out. You can see the quilting better from the back.
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