True Serendipity

Webster's defines serendipity as "The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way: "a fortunate stroke of serendipity."

Just call me the finder of serendipity.  When I finished the last round of this RR, I looked at my two pieces and really didn't have any idea where I'd go next.  I didn't even like them all that much. But I'm not one to give up, so I just set them aside and waited for something to strike my fancy.  Then the "directions" came out for the next step - "Serendipity."  Huh?  I had no idea what that meant as far as quilting went - until yesterday.

I was pretty tired after doing some water aerobics, and decided to quit sewing for a bit and take a nap. As I was cleaning up and putting some things aside, I had to pick up a stack of little wonky stars that I'd made several months ago as leaders and enders.  Then about 15 minutes later, just as I was dropping off to sleep, it hit me.  "Use those stars!"  I'd been wondering what I'd do with them, and I realized I could use a bunch of them on these liberated pieces. I put them on the sides only - I think I'll start going rectangular on these instead of square.

Adding color...and I found an old UFO to use

As I was going through my drawers in my sewing room today, I discovered this:

I had started it last year for a challenge, and put it away while I got distracted with dozens of other projects.   It uses pretty much the same process as the one we're doing for this project, so I decided that I'd just do two of them now.

This step is to add color.  As you look at this piece, you can see lots of yellow.  I had a nice canary yellow solid in my stash, and added borders to this piece. I think they brought everything together quite nicely. : )

The piece below is the one I started for this current project - it began with the pansy block.   I wanted something bright and cheery, and was torn between red and green. My red wasn't cheery enough - so I went with the green:

Cyndi's Step 2

Remember this step 1?

I hung it up on my design wall, and every time I looked at it, I liked it less and less.  I know that putting slashes through blocks was what we were supposed to try, but this just looked like a pansy with a slash through it. I really liked what Janet did with her pansy - she cut it in four pieces, and stuck a different block in the middle, so the pansy almost disappeared.

So today I decided to separate the pansy a little.

So this is my re-do of step 1.

Next, I tackled step 2.  I had lots of already-made crumb fabric.  I added a little more of the black/dots fabric, and cut strips of the made fabric for borders around it all.

Cyndi's Step 1

 I started with two orphan blocks. The first was a Chinese Coins block that I made incorrectly - but couldn't just throw away. The other was a leftover pansy from Block Lotto. 

A couple of slashes, insertion of some flowery strips, dividing the Chinese Coins, and adding a little striped fabric, and here we go!