Jolly Roger Quilt, Part 1

The last time I made a baby quilt, I ended up playing around with 2″ squares. This is as small a piece of fabric I would ever have imagined being willing to work with, but I found myself very pleased with the texture of the finished result.

Somewhere along the way, I started thinking about being able to represent an image with squares, rather than just a pattern. Soon enough I had traced a Jolly Roger (pirate flag) on to graph paper and had executed the grinning skull in mostly black and mostly white fabric.
I worked horizontally, from the bottom up, but certainly could have worked in vertical strips, too. Because I was assembling several rows at once, I tried to label the left-most square of any row (using masking tape and a pen); I also tried to keep written track of which squares had been made and which squares had been joined.

Originally I had thought I would make a choice to go black or white with any given square, just to see if that skull face would show up, but when I sat down I found it was fun and easy to make part-white-part-black squares of any configuration I needed (so much for not sewing with pieces smaller than 2″ by 2″).  I put tape on my cutting square to create a 2″ by 2″ window for composing the squares.
More than once I got bogged down with the pattern, and I even had to tear out two rows when I discovered two errors.
The classic Jolly Roger has a pair of crossed bones below the skull, but I also found other designs, including swords, a single bone, words, and even a heart.
I am not finished with this project, but when I posted pictures of the work in progress, my cousin asked for the plan.