Rita's Surprise guilt

Rita's Seasonal Surprise Quilt
     Until my mid 30's I lived in central Illinois and southern Indiana where the change of season and scenery came and went like clockwork.  But each change of season seemed as a SURPRISE gift to me as if the current season produced amnesia of all seasons past.  We have lived in central Texas for over 30 years and I do miss the definite season change.  Someone once said that the four seasons in Texas are 1. almost summer, 2. summer, 3. still summer, and 4. Christmas.
     The background for the fused raw edge and edge stitched applique is a fun technique to design an original pieced block.  This technique was developed by Raymond Houston and was presented by him as a guest on Alex Anderson's TV show, Simple Quilts. To do this, start with a square divided into a 3 x 3 grid.  Choose a word  (I chose winter, spring, fall, and winter.) and draw a line for each letter from each of the endpoints along the side of the grid using Raymond's alphabetical chart.  Superinpose all the lines of one word on top of one another.  Make four copies of the lined grid and then following the rules of symmetry, create the design. This is always a SURPRISE as to how the individual grids interact withone another in different symmetry arrangements.  With sixteen copies of the grid, some additional SURPRISING secondary patterns appear as well.  These can hopefully be seen in the background squares.  The individual two inch squares were paper pieced (16 squares for each season) and before  being trimmed for this project, all of them together contained exactly 400 pieces.