In Sickness and in Health

Quilting, that is.

I stayed home from work Friday because I was blowing my nose every four minutes and thought I'd save my coworkers from the sights and sounds, and from sharing the germs, of course. But I wasn't actually feeling that bad. (That hit the next day.)

Earlier in the week, I had hauled out the brown and tan fabrics that I bought two summers ago with my mother-in-law:

As I wrote at the time, I am making the quilt for a friend's son's graduation gift. (I still have a couple years, thankfully.)

It's been on my mind and lately I've really been itching to see how the block would come out. How many I could make from a fat quarter's worth of fabric and just where things stand. Whether I would enjoy making the block or not! So I got started. I finished one block the first day I pulled it out and was very pleased with it:

Sharp and crisp. (The brown's darker in person. The white's from a Banana Republic shirt I picked up second hand but was never happy with the fit. I'm very happy, however, with how its colours fit in with this quilt!)

So Friday afternoon, I started on some more:

I love this dark fabric. I think it looks so old fashioned.

This one is also one of my favourites.

So I have five done. The pattern (yes, I'm following a pattern--can you believe it?) calls for 30 of these blocks. I'm not sure how many I will actually do. If it stops being fun, I'll stop and find some other arrangement. Plus I think their quilt size is a little big for a twin. I don't know; I haven't decided yet.

Needless to say, I'm keeping the "Plan" for this quilt rather loose. The last thing I wanted to do was cut everything out all at once and then sew it all together like a "chain-gang" piecing. I know it's more efficient, but if I wanted to be efficient about it, I'd go buy a made-in-China quilt from Walmart. That would be efficient. Instead, I'm having fun.

I did cut out fabric for two blocks every time I made one. (Slightly more efficient while still fun.) So I am getting ahead in the cutting and have little stacks of fabric for blocks:

Some day when I don't have the concentration to cut pieces, I can sew some of these together.

I am just combining lights and darks at will. If I come up with some combinations that don't "match" the rest, then they'll stay with me while the rest get put into the quilt. That's alright; you can't always tell what's going to work ahead of time.

I think I have 6-8 darks and lights so the look will be somewhat scrappy. I'm starting to realize that I don't use enough variety in my scrap quilts to really make them scrappy, but that's alright too. I don't have the stash for it, and I'm not buying 30-60 fabrics for a quilt! I'm just not. I think I'm doing well enough to have improved my light/dark contrast. It's a lot better in this quilt than my cross canoes scrappy quilt top:

This is a mess! As far as colour values and placement. (But don't worry, I still like it anyway!!)

Since Friday, I have not been feeling up to any quilting, but I pinned my blocks up on my curtain to take the pictures and have enjoyed looking at them hanging there.