Julie #10 Beauty From Ashes

It feels good to be on board with a challenge again and with time to actually quilt.
I was surprised to be selected to set the challenge.  Setting the challenge raised the bar for me in making me find time to finish a challenge again.  Thank you for the opportunity.

Here is my submission for "Beauty From Ashes":

This quilt is about 19.5" square.  It will join my rotating "welcome" quilts on my front door.

The story behind my quilt follows.  I have fallen in love with dying fabric.  Yes, it takes a lot of time and energy.  Yes, it is hard to actually cut that fabric after all you've invested in it.  This fall I found what I believed to be the PERFECT project for my hand-dyed fabrics.  It was a mystery quilt for the Carol Doak Yahoo! Group.  Here is the quilt (only a top to date) that I created following her mystery:

This quilt top is actually 42" square.

When you are foundation piecing you cut away a lot of little pieces of fabric.  I just couldn't bear to toss out even a tiny piece that had been trimmed off.  So I saved all those pieces, large and small, in a gallon ziplock bag.  This was my challenge.  What could I do with these "ashes":

I played and played and thought.  I pieced, or crumbed together the four corner blocks.  I liked them, but they just didn't do anything for me.  Then I remembered that I had made all of the blocks per Carol Doak's instructions, but decided I wanted to change the color in one patch on the four corner blocks.  So I remade them.  My original four blocks I decided were more "ashes" from the first project.  Here they are:

As you can tell, these became the center of my "Beauty From Ashes" quilt.  I filled in again from my precious ashes to create setting triangles between the 4 crumb blocks and the center star.   For the border and binding, I went to a small yardage "leftover" from the mystery quilt.  The backing is the only thing not related to the original quilt.

Thank you for allowing me to challenge myself and make be make something of my precious scraps.  Which are now meager, but not exhausted.