Coral Pink Wip

I made a couple quilting New Year's resolutions. First, join a quilt guild. Done. Next, make four quilts in 2008. I could, I suppose, count the Harmony Triangle quilt, but I started it last year, and I really wanted it to be four quilts started and finished in one calendar year.

Now, here's where I could trot out all the reasons why I am making such a late start of it. The wedding, of course, and the fact that I'm now working more as a lawyer. Yadda yadda. I'm sorry, I'm not buying it. I have a sweet deal here, and I have no excuse for not quilting more. So, here's the first quilt done from beginning to end on this blog. Starting at the beginning:

These are strip sets for nine patched to go into a very color-specific crib-size quilt for a little girl. This is "Lesson 7" from Gai Perry's book, "Color from the Heart." I actually picked it out because I liked the mildly monochromatic approach to the quilt: you take a focus fabric and use that as the outermost border. Everything inside that border builds off that focus fabric.

Right up my alley, I figured, as I have quite a few larger-scale florals that really deserve to not be cut into teensy pieces. I picked one of those -- to be seen in a future post -- and started to assemble the fabrics to go with it. Gai is clearly a stash-and-sew kind of quilter, because I count eight fabrics before you even get to the nine-patches, and those are supposed to be constructed from all new fabrics. You need 20 nine-patch blocks, and she really doesn't want more than three to be in the same fabrics. So, I have six dark/light pairs pictured. Yup, that's right -- I'm probably going to use two of those pairs more than thrice. But seriously -- more than 20 fabrics all in the right color family? That's a lot. (In Gai's defense, there are several examples of how Lesson 7 can come out; I happened to pick one that is more monochromatic than your average quilt.)

The strips are 1.5", so the nine-patch blocks are only 3" finished. Not big. They get put on point, alternated with 3" squares of the other fabrics, then setting triangles, inner (inner) border, outer (inner) border and finally the outer (outer) border, which is the focus fabric you first thought of.

I'd love to get this done before we leave for Alaska, but I also have to complete an applique block, so let's not get too crazy about this. After all, the little girl I'm making it for is still (probably) sleeping in a crib . . .