row by row experience 2015 - row one

I finally got on the cool kid train and picked up my first row pattern at Kelly's
Sewing Corner in Erie! I'm keeping everything organized in my wicked cool binder from my college days as a member of Alpha Psi Omega - I don't remember what our rush was, but we picked Wicked as our musical and I did a fusible appliqué for my binder instead of printing out a color image and sliding it into the front of a binder pocket.

I also picked up some excellent fabric to help tie the quilt together -  the beach glass was made especially for the Row By Row experience this year. And for Erie, why no one has lobbied for beach glass fabric before, I'll never know. People are obsessed with the stuff. For real.

I'm going to use my batik stash for this project, since one of my goals is to move on with a bin of finished quilt tops/finished quilts and not bins of fabric... we will see how that works out... you should see how many bins of potential projects I have... forget the bins of loose fabric...

Anyway. The first row I picked up!

 The star part is pretty straight forward, I just found the cutting directions confusing at first - like the 'cut star points' {what? oh, you want me to cut out squares, gotcha. Tell me that first, the way you told me to cut out 4 rectangles.}

 Then to complete the row, you have to make the chevron wave blocks and add 'bubble fabric' [the dark bars]. At least the chevron is sewn by making strips, or I'd have thrown this out the window, or made it up myself.

When I make this myself, I plan on grading the colors of the block so that chevrons go light to dark the way water would. I appreciate the use of nautical fabric, but I found it a little busy myself.