10.30: Coloring my world

It’s my friend’s birthday today & I was so worried that she’d become the newest member of The Bad Birthday Club… but, thankfully, I don’t think that will happen. It’s bleak & agonizing, though, no doubt about that. I hope that peace comes soon.

Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud. ~Maya Angelou

I decided last week that I wanted to make a quilt. Like, right now. I needed something to dive into, as none of my current projects is speaking to me in a satisfying way. (I may now have the reserves & bandwidth to persevere.) I returned from Nashville with a couple of Kaffe Fassett fat quarter collections, adding to the random KF FQs & other cuts that I’ve collected over the past couple of years (see image below), and it seemed silly to just put them away… so a simple quilt seemed to be the thing. Plus, we need something on our bed that actually fits, and hopefully these fabrics will help brighten my world as the dark days loom ahead.

I found a super easy/fast quilt pattern that seemed perfect for the mostly large-scale prints I wanted to use. I pulled out all the fabric, mixed it all up (accidentally), and then sorted it to find some combinations that worked.

(In the process, other ideas were percolating!)

Naturally, I made it quite a bit bigger. And I didn’t mind the long diagonal stripes, but I liked it better broken up. Most of the prints were directional, or I’d probably have done a big chevron type thing.

After a bit more rearranging, everything is sewn together. I had to rip & re-sew more than a couple of seams and there are some woefully mismatched corners. I’m not sure I’d be very good at more intricate designs. I’m contemplating finished size, whether to add a border or just binding, and how to actually quilt it. I’ll be taking it to the quilt shop soon (maybe tomorrow) to get a professional opinion.

We live in a rainbow of chaos. ~Paul Cézanne

The crocheted granny square blanket is finished! After all the squares were stitched together, I went around the whole thing with a row of double crochet in each color to finish it off. There was just a small ball of each color remaining.

The back story of this project is that the yarn was given to me by an Airbnb guest who has stayed with me a few times over the years — the first time was when she brought her dad for his first game at Lambeau Field. She booked early and was very communicative, as her dad was undergoing treatment for cancer at the time; thankfully, his treatment was successful & he/they’ve been visitors a few times since then. The game last year was right around Christmas… she’d asked me, at one point, what my favorite colors were & I said “jewel tones” (because that can be SUCH a hard question to answer). Lo, she gave me a big skein of acrylic yarn in each of the colors you see. I added the “antique white” to pull it together. I really felt that I needed to honor her gift, even though I’d never have chosen that yarn (which wasn’t too bad, actually, outside of being just a tad splitty). I’ve talked about the rest of my process for this project before — and it really was fun, start to finish.

And I’m glad I’m finished.

I hope all is well out in blogland. I am so behind, I may have to draw a line in the sand — “mark as read” older posts and move on.