Before I left California I signed up for the third session of the Fab Little Quilt Swap that's hosted on flickr. I've been working very slowly on this quilt. First I took a long time trying to figure out what my partner would like. I don't like to get it wrong and make an effort to stalk their flickr photostream for favorites as well as their blog if they have one. After many weeks I came up with a bunch of sketches:
These are the cleaned up thumbnail sketches. The first ones are doodled here and there on my notepad in between to-do lists and info on possible rental houses before we settled on the one that we moved into.
I decided that I liked the lower left sketch the best. The background will be a gradation of neutrals from dark to light and back again. It's bifurcated by a flying geese band that gets bigger at the bottom. Those will most likely be in a rainbow of colors. Then on the right there'll be four NY Beauty blocks sewn together to form a type of mariner's compass. I may or may not embroider a 'N' at the top. That'll be for last.
So far I've pulled fabrics for the NY Beauties and the neutrals. I only had about five tan/brown fabrics so I discarded them and went with black/white/grey because I had a lot of those. I'm not exactly sure how I'll do the background - whether I'll just piece random rectangles/squares or if I'll cut out triangles with the Sizzix die cutter.
I've sewn parts of two NY Beauty blocks so far. I think they'll be pretty cool once they're done.
