I did not start a quilt for Nia, though I’m about to start knitting her a sweater. Yes, if she gets sent to her great aunt I’ll regret it, but for now I’m focusing on selfish piecing and patient parenting.
I don’t have photos of our bedroom or bed because that would require being on top of things rather than just imagining how I’ll write this post for the last week or so, but we got three layers of wallpaper scraped off, the plaster fixed, and the room painted Martha Stewart Milk Pail, a warm gray-blue. This is our stained glass window, because somehow we’ve become the sort of people who have a spectacular stained glass window in the bedroom:
So I’ve wanted to make something for our bedroom and I’ve been wanting to use colors that come from the stained glass. Then I saw that Lynne at Lily’s Quilts had a new quilt design idea she’s calling Fruity Lozenges. When she posted a link to the templates I was off and running.
Lynne has ended up making scrappy lozenges with each “leaf” a different fabric, but I was taken with the X look in her original mockup and have stuck with that and planned to have my blocks of four connect directly to one another, with no sashing. I realized I was thinking of each lozenge as a petal and that these were actually reminiscent of dogwood blossoms, the inspiration for the motifs in the Handstitched Class’s Modern Medallion Quilt I’d originally intended as the use for the fabrics that have gone into my lozenge instead.
Once I started the project, I bought a neutral semi-solid (Moda French General Rouennieres Texture Oyster, though I’m usually more of a gray fan) and decided to use that for my “background” squares within the pattern. I’m not entirely sold on them yet, but I think they’ll work with the green Kaffe Fassett Millefiore to let me actually make a central block based on what would have been the center reverse applique dogwood blossom for the Modern Medallion quilt only scaled down to meet my 9-inch square size.
If I make that the middle square and then have four-bloom blocks for the rest of the quilt, I think I’ll get something that fits our general house aesthetic, modern with respect for history. I’ve already scaled back my ambitions to a square seven blocks on a side, so 72 inches before I add some sort of border (size of a lozenge and a half?) on each side. At this point, for every three blocks I make that are three prints/one solid, I get to make one that’s three solids/one print. I have 17 prints I’m working with and 10 solids.
Some of the prints (like the fussy cut ikat stripes above) I love and some of them (like the pinkish flowers above) I don’t but think will work to keep the scale of the quilt from being too bold or too blah. I may turn out to be mistaken about all of this, but I’ve bought a half yard of all the prints and that should give me enough to make 7 blooms from each with plenty left over for pillows or something else at the end.
This may end up a disaster, but for now I’m zipping along and loving the process. I can’t wait to have something special and handmade in our bedroom, except of course that I can because I’ve had a gorgeous lace shawl I’ve meant to use as a curtain sitting unblocked in a drawer since I finished it just before we moved in last year. But hey, this is something new and thus fun and so I’m happy for now.