Sew many little things

First of all thank you for the recommendations for pasty recipes.  I vow I will not be defeated merely because my first attempt could accurately be described as drier than the Gobi Desert and with a somewhat similar sand-like consistency.  Nor will my latent Devonian need to cast nastushiums at something which claims to be Cornish lead me to put aside my lard in favour of its more refined artery-clogging cousin, clotted cream (although scones do sound pretty good right now).  Come back later for a surfeit of pastry and a comparison of the relative merits of Delia, the Hairy Bikers and the good old St Michael Freezer Cookery Book (a legacy from a time when Chicken a la Kiev was something rather new and exciting).

Having ever so slightly possibly sworn off cooking in a fit of pique at the state of Pasties Mark 1, I turned to my sewing machine for a little solace, and as Miss Kitty seems quite happy to sit in her bouncy seat alongside Mummy and play with Emily-dolly while Mummy sews, I've actually managed to get a few things finished.  That and I got in the zone on Satuday night and stayed up after her highness had gone to bed.

First off the machine; a final block from the block of the month club.  I knew it was meant to be Drunkard's Path and I'm equally certain that this is not the one they did in class, but I found it by the wonders of Google-fu:


A three-colour Drunkard.

I also did a bit of Google magic for a block to replace my Celtic Knot.  I had originally planned to do a repeat block but your comments helped me to decide to go hunting for something new and complimentary.  And so it came to pass that I discovered Jacob's Ladder blocks and their three-colour variation which goes by a myriad of names but which I like to call:


The Tail on Benjamin's Kite. It's also known as Stepping Stones and Underground Railroad among other things.

And so we have our final 12:

Now all I need is a little sashing and binding and we might just have a quilt by my self imposed deadline of the end of the month.

The only thing that could get in the way with that otherwise excellent plan is a little project which has a serious deadline on it.  A 'finish it before the recipient moves halfway aropund the world' kind of deadline.

One of the Mummies in my group of friends is about to go far far away on a year's secondment for her husband's job.  As a keepsake for her daughter the plan is to fabric paint handprint all our babies and then use those prints as the centre of a quilt block.  H and I tried it out using Kitty as our test-baby and I knocked up a prototype from the scraps basket, et voila:


The smudge underneath isn't a smudge it's her real name and the star pattern is courtesey of AmandaJean's great tutorial here.  I'm quite pleased with this as a first draft - not least because my piecing has got so much more accurate since I first made a version of this star for my big blue and white quilt.

My questiopn to you all is; if I go with a mixture of dark fabrics for the background, do you think it would look best if they were an organised mixture like the prototype, completely random (a bit like this), or more consistant (ie one star, one background)?