QIP: Continued Evolution

Dear Shayne,

As I mentioned, the original plan I had for the quilt blocks I'm working on changed once I made the first one. And now that I've completed all of the blocks, I've found that I need to change out two of them.

Here is Hipstamatic photo of all of the current blocks -- with the colors reduced by this filter (Libatique 73, if you're wondering), you can really see the problem:


It's that one super-dark block -- it's the black hole of this quilt!

I tried moving it around, but it just doesn't play well with others. It's harder to see, but the one in the lower left hand corner is also awfully dark, so it's also getting remade.

My other option would to be to make some additional darker blocks, but I'm worried about things getting too Halloween-y. So I'm going to replace these two with medium grey versions.

I hate to waste blocks I've made, so I'm thinking of making these two into Halloween pillows. First, I gotta finish this quilt. Wish me luck!

love,
kelly

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