I’ve been plugging along on the quilt for our guest bedroom. Life has intervened somewhat – big surprise – and my quilting space, as wonderful as it is, is a little small to lay out all the squares, even on the floor. I tried moving over to D—’s side of the basement, but he has guitars, drums, mic stands, you name it over there. And I could still only find room to lay out about half of it.

Continure reading…

My husband and I have lived in our home about 7 years now. In that time, we have remodeled the kitchen/family room, living room, dining room, sunporch, and basement. The only room untouched on the first floor is the half bath. But we’ll get to that later.

The only room on the second floor that has been done is my step-daughter’s room. We wanted to make sure she was comfortable first as she wouldn’t be living with us that much longer. She was a junior in high school at the time and would be leaving for college soon.

This is all a very long way of saying that I am finally getting to the guest room. My husband took the lovely wood duck wallpaper border off years ago, but that’s as far as we got. I’ve decided to do the whole room in yellows, grays, and whites. Me being me, I am starting with the quilt. It will take the longest time.

My usual modus operandi (can you tell I’m an avid mystery reader?) for designing a quilt is to pick the fabrics first.

Whites

I will likely not use all the fabrics I’m showing here, but you never know. Because I also like the scrappy look of lots of different fabrics.

Grays

The one on the bottom of the gray group has bits of yellow in it too. It’s sort of hard to see in this picture. Hopefully, the wild pattern won’t be too distracting and will simply hold the colors together.

Yellows

The fabric on the top of the yellow group is leftovers from  the backing on Lightship (see Quilt Sampler). The walls in the room will be painted yellow, so the overall look of the quilt will dictate which paint I end up with.

Blacks

Blacks are included to give it a little punch and definition. I went through lots of books and catalogs to get my inspiration for the design. I settled on a fairly basic pattern that I liked online before going through my books. The pattern I chose is from Kaffe Fassett’s Glorious Patchwork. The book was a gift from my cousin Sascha almost 10 years ago when I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. But that’s another story.

Fassett’s designs aren’t all that complicated, but his colors choices are something else!

My design on the left. Kaffe Fassett’s on the right.

If you look carefully at these, you can see that they are almost the same thing. The only change I will be making to mine is to split each patch to match the shading of the one from the book. This is why I needed a black.  The squares that are gray on my design will be the pyramid shape in the middle.

Next step is to calculate how many of each color I need to cut and go at it. There are templates in the back of the book, so I won’t have to draw that part.

But for today, I am painting the “woodwork” in my upstairs hall. I use the term woodwork loosely, because it’s all that hollow core stuff. Practically pressed paper. Anyway, it’s all a hideous shade of dark walnut now. And I’m just not happy unless I’m doing 4 things at once. So look for the cut pieces of quilt in about a week!