Finished 9 October 2016

Broken Dishes is a really good way to practice one's half-square triangle skills. Of course, I'll cheat by using the magic 8 method for creating pre-joined HST squares.

I went through my stash and pulled out the fabrics with dots. I'll name this one Dots and Dishes.

One can cut a little bigger, and square up and re-size each block before piecing them together, but this is an exercise in accuracy, so I'll use the exact 7-3/4" squares to (hopefully) produce exact 3-1/2" half-square triangle blocks.

And here we have four sets of near-perfect HST blocks with no wasted fabric at all.

More sets of HST squares arranged in traditional Broken Dishes blocks. This will make a bright, cheerful quilt.

Once I decided this was going to be for a friend's nearly grown son, I started adding a block border, and kept making blocks...

And this is not a baby quilt any more.

A final green print border to draw the eye out and soften the effect of the stark black inner borders, and some nice flannel for the backing, and I have a nice snuggly quilt for a friend's son who is in the army.

Then I found out out that the son has grown considerably, and is well over six feet tall now. So just to be on the safe side, I added another row of blocks.

The Quilting

First I simply quilted in the ditch on both sides of the black borders. Then I did some fancy free-motion quilting in the white triangles of the broken dishes blocks. I left the colored triangles free so they would puff up a little in contrast to the stitched-down background.

The sashing and outer border is quilted in a free-motion leaf pattern, using a variegated green thread.

I wash my quilts before binding, and pre-wash the binding fabric. That way the quilt is nice and puffy and crinkled, but the binding stays smooth and flat.