Hat Swap Quilt

I should work at the Sail Away Quilt because our exhibition date in November is the latest deadline for this project. But I'm a bit frustrated. I wanted to applique the ships with the buttonwhole stitch my machine provided. I also made the paper for machine applique on the backside of the fabric but my machine has some problems with the big amount of seams. So I put the quilt away and digged out my hat swap blocks.

The swap was in 2004 where I was at the very beginning of patchworking. The subject was to make hat blocks. The problem was that I couldn't find any patterns on the web and in my books - beside sun bonnet sue hats and I don't like them that much. Jennifer – a quilter from Salt Lake who spent a year with her family in my area – designed a head on EQ5 for me. The only other thing that came in my mind was a crown. The blocks were accepted by the swap mom and I got back a lot of beautiful blocks. Appliquè a hat and add some embroidery never came into my mind.

The blocks were sitting in a box since then. Sometimes I picked them out and looked at them. Now I picked them out to make a quilt out of them. I decided to frame them with attic windows and sashing that the quilt look like a huge wardrobe of hats.
The last days I cutted the stripes for the attic window and sewed them on the blocks. Next thing will be the layout.