Squirrels on the Loose!

I was patiently and calmly quilting the Adinkra quilt, following  the momentum I had built on quilting a couple of other quilts recently. I stitched in the ditch. Remember the good old days when stitching in the ditch was the quilting, and not the preparation for the quilting? I quilted the inner borders.  I am now working on the individual blocks. I haven't decided on what to do with the outer borders yet.

But then Black Friday and subsequent sales happened and fabric and beads and scrapbooking paper kept jumping into my cart.  Nothing like a mystery quilt to give yourself an excuse to buy fabric! I am going to make Bonnie Hunter's On Ringo Lake Mystery Quilt.  Right now, I made about a fourth of part one of the mystery blocks. I think I want a small wall hanging but I am very tempted to make the full size. I had to stop myself from making any more blocks. I think I need a bit more variety of fabrics in this set.

And then when I was making the first blocks for the mystery quilts, I decided to go into this box for a wider range of the aqua/teal colors.  And saw that even though I've collected this fabric for a long time, I haven't cut or sewn anything. I said I wanted to make this quilt a long time ago, ahem in June of 2015. I even made a label for it for my sidebar.

I decided that this equilateral triangle quilt would work wonderfully as a leader and ender.  Not much thinking required to just sew triangles together.  I cut what I could into triangles, and the leftovers can go into the mystery quilt.

Yeah, I've added two new quilts to the mix, and there are a few others that are trying to weasel their way in line.  The WIPs just took a tiny step backwards, and I will continue to work on them so they can also continue to make progress.

A Quilt for My Bed

The downsizing of the stuff in my house continues, and one of the things that have recently been downsized is my bed.  I have replaced my queen sized bed with a full size one.  I never did like the headboard, and through a complicated series of decisions, I decided that a full size bed would work better for me.

Once I realized how much smaller this bed is, and how the queen size was not too big for my room, I thought I would regret my decision to downsize the bed.  But since we haven't had a full size bed in the house since I was younger, I need to buy new sheets and new bedding.

I have looked online for different comforter sets and quilts, but none of them really seemed to call to me.  I want something wild - lime green, bright orange, turquoise, sunshine yellow and royal purple  - with crazy patterns swirling together, yet cohesive and pretty.   The it finally hit me - maybe I should commission myself to make a quilt for my bed. I would work for free!  It is sad how long it took me to have that realization and decision.

I have been gravitating towards diamonds lately. I looked at many different diamond patterns until I realized that I could get a quilt off my bucket list.  A simple equilateral triangle one.  The repetition of a simple shape would tame all the wild colors and patterns, and give an interesting sparkling look. It would let the fabrics shine without a great deal of effort on my part.  While it might be interesting to make a big quilt with lots and lots of teeny tiny pieces, I have decided I am going to scale up and make a more manageable size triangle.  I haven't decided on the size yet, but right now I am leaning towards five inches wide or maybe even bigger.

I am really getting excited about the fabric selection process - I have been collecting lime and turquoise fabrics for a while now - ever since I painted my bedroom lime green in 2009. I think it was the sheer size of a queen size quilt in my little domestic machine that prevented me for actually making a quilt for that bed.  But now I have a small and simple bed, and will start making a quilt for it.

Once I finish my Elephant Parade and Life of Plenty quilts, that is.