Return of the string quilt

Remember this?

I’d started making a wee lap quilt back in August, but put it aside when I got busy with other projects, and the squares have been sitting in a pile on my desk ever since waiting for inspiration to strike.  With all of my Christmas projects out of the way, and wanting something to practice free-motion quilting on, inspiration struck, and I pulled the pieces out to sew them together.
But when I laid them out, I wasn’t totally happy with them.  Although I’d tried to be totally chaotic with the stripes, the overall effect was a bit boring.  It needed something more, to disrupt the pattern slightly.  And then I had a thought.
Remember this?

It’s my very first attempt at paper-piecing, produced in the class Tartankiwi taught nearly two years ago.  It has likewise been sitting waiting for inspiration to strike about what to do with it, but it’s quite small, so it never quite fit into anything I had in mind.
Can you see where this is going?
I decided to try something totally experimental and see if I could sew the cat heart into one of the blocks of the quilt, to break up the pattern and add a tiny point of interest.  At first I was thinking it should be in the centre, but it’s so small it just looked lost there, and it broke up the pattern too much.  So instead I put it up in the corner:

Yes, it’s a bit weird, but I kind of like it.  I think it adds just the right amount of extra chaos to an already chaotic quilt.  And as I’m actually making this quilt for me for a change, I’m the only one who has to like it, so I can do all these silly experimental things and have fun, and who cares if it turns out looking weird or not according to the rules of a “proper” quilt 🙂
(The very sharp-eyed among you may notice that the square the cat heart is in doesn’t actually feature in the original layout of quilt squares.  That’s because I managed to completely mess up my measurements in my first attempt, and cut the square the wrong way, so I had to chuck that one out and start again, making a whole new quilt square to piece the heart into.)
Next step, making a backing for it.  I’ve got some thoughts there too…