One project is not enough

I am very happy to borrow other people's ideas. I will make them mine. This very much applies to quilting. As I showed in yesterday's post, I'll use an '87 design I found. My background fabric is black with a tiny red streak and the ribbons will be many shades of reds. Here's another pattern from Quilters Newsletter, this one from June 2000 designed by Elizabeth T. Miller [I believe in crediting designers even if I'm going to change the design -- I don't know if I'll do the border, probably not like hers]. Mine will not be red, as I'm using red in the other project, I'll dig into a different color of my stash, blue or maybe brown.

I'm inspired by someone who did a show-and-tell at a guild meeting last spring. Hers was a one-patch quilt that she had hand sewn at meetings and other qulet moments. I used to take needlepoint to meetings back when I was a "meeting lady.' I still like needlepoint but I'd rather make a quilt. However I didn't want to do a one patch design that I could sew on a machine much faster. I wanted to do something that I might not do otherwise, either a baby blocks or a drunkard's path, both of which need careful matching. I leaned toward the latter and when I saw this design I knew I'd found my project. I've made templates and all I have to do is cut out several for a start. Add some pins, a needle, thread, thimble and thread cutter to a little ziplock baggie -- a size I can carry in my purse. And I'm all set. It will take several months to do enough squares for the quilt but that's prefectly all right.

I especially love the scrappiness of this design. In fact, I can't really get over thinking that a "real" quilt is made of scrraps - even if those are in the form of fat quarters and cuttings from other quilts rather than true scraps. I love that so many designs and shades of a color can meld together harmoniously ... like a crowd of people at a cultural event -- all different kinds of people, dressed all kinds of ways, speaking different languages. But all harmoniously enjoying something together.