Evolution of a Quilt Block

Dear Shayne,

Well! After a big spurt of posts in July, we fell silent once again. And, once again, I'm going to end our blog break with... a quilt! This one is still in progress, but I thought I'd post along the way.

So... the day after Biscuit died, I found a fabric that reminded me of the color and pattern of his fur. I fell in love with it and knew I had to make a little Biscuit-inspired lap quilt:

(Moda Fabrics' Central Park Carousel Sunshine by Kate Spain.)

I was also buying some grey fabric for this quilt and the orange and grey looked great together, so I was set!

I've never used a "feature fabric" in a quilt before, as I am a very patchwork-y girl, but I really do love this one, so I decided to give it a shot.

I have loved this quilt from Denyse Schmidt Quilts for awhile (Denyse Schmidt is a goddess, by the way -- that book is awesome):


And I recently saw this antique quilt in Modern Log Cabin Quilting by Susan Beal (another goddess and another fabulous book):


So I drew this:


However, once I made the first block...


I realized that the strips were all too wide and uniform for my liking. I think my error was that the center square needed to be larger, but... it wasn't.

Since I didn't really want to re-make that block, I decided to trim down the final grey border and then funk up the other blocks with a variety of thinner and thicker strips. Like so:

(The lower left block in that group is the one from above, but with the final grey border trimmed down.)

I have been second-guessing my decision to use a single grey fabric for each block -- I'm a patchwork-y gal and it would have been more interesting to mix 'em up -- but I've been thinking a lot about Biscuit as I make this quilt and he was always a scaredy cat, so he probably would have preferred this "safer" choice.

You know, if a cat could talk about his quilt preferences.

All right. I think this quilt is going to be 16 blocks. I've got 10 done, so there's 6 more to go. I'll post again when they're finished.

And what have you been up to?

love,
kelly