Picasso's Puzzle Quilt

Here comes another attempt at posting a blog using photos from the camera on my phone. I'm a little more hopeful of good results this time! 

So this is a tale of a small plastic box that has been floating around in my workroom, my garage, outdoors during the Great Renovation Experience of 2008, in storage... and finally into  my newest workroom.  May I present Picasso's Puzzle. 

The story is that back in the early '90s, I had found a pattern for the old style Streak of Lightning quilt, which someone had made up and called Hot Flashes. Well, that's kind of an inspiring name, and I knew just what to use: a new fabric that had come into the shop (the original Bearly Stitchin' on Roosevelt, in Pasadena, before it was expanded) from Hoffman International. They had a line called Pablo's  Puzzle, based on some Picasso-ish squiggles and zigzags and things.
I pulled a group of matching solids--and by the way, these Kona cottons are all still available!. I cut out all the triangles and sashing strips and put them in a box, which I even labeled Hot Flashes Quilt. 

Fast forward to last Monday--20+ years later, after the box had survived many moves and shuffles and threats of being tossed by persons unknown. 
 

Pablo's Puzzle by Hoffman International

These shapes are parallelograms, not trapezoids.

Back view

I was working on the Prismatic Star, having finally figured out the easiest and best way to sew the diagonal pieces together so they had a prayer of matching. (I know that Judy's patterns are precisely engineered and in theory go together like buttah. I am not the most precise sewer, though, so mine need a little fiddling and adjusting to get the diagonals to match.) When I had sewn a fourth set together and put them down on top of the previous three, and discovered that they were all soaking wet since the iron had leaked--well, that was the last straw! 
I needed something quick, easy, and relatively mindless. My eye lit on the Hot Flashes box... and the rest is history. I spent most of Monday sewing triangles to triangles and then into rows, with just a few hiccups along the way. 

Fast forward to today, Saturday, and I finished the piecing--even figured out how to eke out enough extra Pablo to make side borders. So after 20 years of languishing, in less than a week it's a finished top, has been assigned a backing fabric (lime green with white bubbles) and is once again in a box, this time to ship to my faithful longarmers!

 There may be a moral to this story, but if there is, it's eluding me. However, it's another UFO to move up the list. I had to add it to the sidebar, because it was so deep in obscurity it never made it to that special place. I renamed it Picasso's Puzzle, because the old name just didn't fit, and besides, that was the other quilter's name for her quilt. Mine will remind me of visiting the Musee Picasso in Antibes and perhaps inspire me to unearth some more project boxes. Yes, sadly, there are more of them lurking...

Contents of "the box." Talk about a precut kit!