Stress Relief

Technology and I did not have a good week last week. Our charge machine at the store lost an entire day of sales that had to be recovered. The phones went out for some unexplained reason. I thought the battery in my car died, but when we took it in to have the mechanic look at, it turned out to be the starter and the brake pads and the……. $800 later I needed a little stress relief. Guess how I relieve stress?

I promised that I would show you snapshots of what I have been working on as soon as I had the chance to take the photos and muster the strength (and brain cells) to whip them into a suitable posting format.

These projects will be new patterns under The Quilt Company name THIS SPRING. Consider this your sneak peek; the patterns won’t be ready for months. The fabrics are all shades of “solid” batiks. Each of the quilts uses – or will use 10 fabrics when finished.

The first groups of fabrics that I chose to work with were the bright. I love this woven log cabin idea. The block is simple and easy to assemble, but you have to carefully plan the color placement. Some of the blocks “spin” to the left and some “spin” to the right to create the illusion that it is woven. This project makes me very thankful for our color printer. Writing and following instructions without color illustrations for this project would be frustrating. Yea technology! (I’m just trying to get on the good side of the tech gods).

I split the pastel group into a “boy” and a “girl” assortment. The blue quilt has the narrow border option, which allows you to use one width of fabric for the back of the quilt. I like the wider border, but let’s face it; sometimes a single width of fabric for the backing is a better choice. These quilts will definitely be kits in the store. The pieces are cut from 2½ inch strips – jelly roll anyone?

You may notice that this jewel tone project has only 9 fabrics. The tenth fabric is a beautiful shade of lapis blue that will be the accent in the pieced border. Right now I have 2 plans for the border. I haven’t decided between a simple easy strip and squares idea or another one that is absolutely beautiful, but looks like brain surgery. I’m leaning toward simple. The blocks are so fast and fun to make that I hate to frustrate someone when they get to the border instructions.

Last, but definitely not least, these are the center blocks for the appliqué project. This photo was taken with them stuck to the design wall. In the actual quilt they will have dark blue stars surrounding them and an absolutely killer woven border in three shades of gold. I started to hand appliqué these blocks, then reality set in. I have to finish this quilt along with the others and one more that is still in pieces and write the instructions before spring Market. These blocks are fused. I spent all day yesterday doing the machine stitching…. all 3 layers of all 4 flowers, 32 buds and 96 leaves, I'm feeling a little better now.

Karen