Working Through the Steps

It was great to see Antique Crows finally come together for a true blue finish! The hand quilting wasn't always the most fun as I was stitching on the inside of each of the 'points'. That's what I wanted for the look and texture though, so just kept slogging along regardless of extra layers of fabric. 

Antique Crows for the finish!

The backing is a bought-on-clearance, Kaffe, woven, stripe fabric. Makes for a great drape and feel and especially wonderful for summer! I'm already using this on our bed although it's a bit girly compared to the colors I usually prefer in our bedroom. Just. Could. Not. Resist.

Full view

This was a quilt where I really pushed myself to use busier prints than normal. It's a little frustrating to see fabrics stacking up in the totes and never quite feel comfortable enough to use them. I'd been wanting to make a New York Beauty quilt for years and that has always been just a little beyond my comfort zone as well. 

Love the mismatched circles....

Finally, in the year 2017, I admitted to myself that the New York Beauty was probably never gonna happen and instead decided to draft this more simplistic, chunkier-look block. Hey, why not? I started with cream quarter circle cut-outs from behind some other {previous} quilt and that was it, I was charmed into following my curiosity. This particular stack of fabric caught my eye and I was off and running. Catch me if you can!

Such a happy, fun look!

Like most everything else, it was a lot harder in my imagination than it was in reality. I'm so very glad that I made up my own block and ended up with this folksy, happy looking quilt! The colors may be a tad modern looking, but overall the vibe seems fairly cozy which of course is always my end goal. The added whimsy of the blocks coming together into a mismatched circle totally makes me smile. How could it get any better?

Spring Flowers

Lots of jumping around from project to project this past week. There are other things that I should be working on, but these flowers went ahead and pulled me in instead. At this point, I have all the stems and flowers stitched down and now just need to attack the leaves.

Seedpod Flower quilt

Uh huh. That seemed rather boring and so I changed directions altogether. This is an oldish project that I last worked on around this time last year. Well, that's not entirely true because I'm pretty sure that I cut some of the blocks out in December. It just never gained any real traction because of that border around the Seedpod flower. It has always been just a little bit wrong and thus, made the whole project rather confusing.

Starting to put the parts together

So I totally ignored this project in the hopes that it would somehow fix itself. But it didn't. Of course not! Why do some quilts always have to be so unreasonable? Having a rare, relatively empty house over the weekend tipped me over into the red zone as far as guilt goes, though. The centerpiece is just too good to abandon forever. Best get crack-a-lackin' and figure something out! 

The little blocks were oh-so-tedious to sew together. I think there's over 150 of them? I knew they needed to be available for auditioning purposes before making any serious decisions about moving forward. And I was right about needing to have the border attached, whether it was exactly how/what I envisioned or not. That's the point where I had stopped last August. More like froze in total indecision! The way this scrappy block {look} goes together, it seemed critical to have the width measurement for those little blocks in order to feel perfectly okay about moving forward. I do so hate to have an excess of wasted parts and too, I only have a finite amount of appropriate colored fabric to use in this quilt. What's a girl to do?

Why couldn't I just wing it like I do with everything else you ask? I don't know! Everything within resisted so strongly, there seemed to be no other option. If there's one thing I've learned through the years, it's to trust the quilt. Just had to keep tamping down the panic trying to rise up and take it one step at a time. By the time the quilt was at the stage you can see in the last picture, ideas were finally, finally starting to well up in my brain. There's something very palpable about the energy that builds when chain piecing and 'thinking' without really 'thinking' about a specific problem in a quilt. Then, when trying to lay different colored blocks out and balance appropriately with the various fabric strips? It all just sort of gelled. Thank goodness! What about this? How about that? Until all the working parts started making sense as a unit.

So that's where my time and attention has been for several days. I've finally got everything sewed up into rows and a serious applique plan for dealing with the blue border. It isn't very complicated after all, just fussy cutting from a rather small hunk of what used to be a fat quarter. And the width of the border remains exactly the same. No lost time and effort there after all!*sigh  Don't you love it when a difficult quilt starts cooperating?

More Progress on the Applique and the Start of a New Project

The Dried Flower blocks are ready for the leaves now. As of this posting, they are cut out and ready for stitching. Nine blocks of the larger, more rounded leaves and three of the narrow, wavy leaves. We'll see how that works out, but I'm really looking forward to seeing how these odd shaped blocks finish up! 

Dried Flowers

 I've also been steadily progressing through the chunky New York Beauty blocks. Only 10 blocks to go when I took this picture, but as of last night, all that's left to do are the gold arcs across the bottom of the 'points'. Whew! It's been a real slog getting through all 64 blocks! It's time for a break though, so now I'll probably stitch the leaves for the Dried Flowers before coming back to these.

Quarter Circles/Chunky New York Beauty Blocks

I also jumped right into the middle of a project that's been simmering for a very long time. At the last minute I switched the colors around and decided to make the baskets yellow and coral/pink instead of using the yellow for background color like originally intended.

Improv. Baskets

Not sure why I did that, but it made sense at the time. Now I'll probably go with a boring cream as the background but that's okay--the basket is probably busy enough already! The vintagey fabric above was the one I was most worried about, but now that the basket is coming together, it's my favorite. Just have to be careful when ironing as it doesn't appear to be 100 percent cotton. Love, love, love the more intense colors of that block though!

I'm calling it 'Sweet Tart'

No pattern for these baskets, just kind of winging it improv. style. Basically I cut 5 1/2" squares on the diagonal and then crosscut them again, arranged them on the design wall, and then sewed them into rows. I have a certain final block size in mind and so there's a rough template for the outside dimensions too. One more to go and then it'll be time to figure out the handle and start doing the prep work for the flowers that will be stitched 'inside'. After the last bit of marathon applique, it feels wonderful to stop at only four blocks!