Irish Hills Patchwork Quilt

I posted this yesterday, and only recently found out about the Bloggers Quilt festival, hosted by Amy's Creative Side. I hope it's okay to enter this quilt! :) I thought this might be a good way to get out into the blogosphere and meet some new quilting bloggers. So thanks for stopping by - here we go!

Mom mom lives in an area of Michigan that people call "the Irish hills". I don't know why it's named that. Well, it does have rolling hills, and I just googled it - apparently it was settled by the Irish. Now I know! In any case, it's really beautiful and the downtown area is charming, but if you get outside of town it's sort of "country", if you know what I mean. (Nothin' wrong with country! I'm actually living in the burbs, wanna-be-country style - I swear we are starting our own farmers market in the backyard, but that's another story..)

One of the first times my fiance and I drove there together, we stopped at a somewhat decrepit gas station/"everything" store to get some beer. We were the only people there, except for one guy at the register buying a case of Budweiser and having a very intense conversation with the cashier about night crawlers. I guess we looked like outsiders or something, because the guy eventually turned around and said to us (rather creepily, through the few teeth he had left) WELCOME TO THE HILLS! (Mm, thanks?!! lol) We felt like we were in a movie, but I guess you had to be there!

So yeah.. how does this all relate to the quilt?  It started it's life in "the Hills" - you could say that's where it was born, aww. I found a quilt top, in an antique store, that somebody (I wonder who?!) had started and never finished, and the price was right so I grabbed it and eventually used parts of it to make this large patchwork. I guess I'm taking someone else's history and pushing it forward?

Inspiration? Well, I gotta give some love to Film in the Fridge, as this quilt is one of my favorite's of hers!

I realized I didn't really care for this green color on the backing much too late, so now I just live with it.

Most of the fabric on the top didn't come from the found quilt top. I'd say only about 20% is from the antique store find.

So I'm left with much of the found quilt leftover - I am starting to think of how I can use the rest of the fabric. There is some WHACK fabric in there. I mean look at those neon stripes.

But there are some real gems in there - I especially love this aztekky looking print on the top left:

Maybe I will cut the rest into jelly roll type stripes, along with some solids and sew up one of those race-type quilts. Or maybe it'll sit in my craft room closet for a few years. :P

If you are still reading, thank you for checking out my quilt. I will be clicking on as many of you as I can this weekend!