This is another quilt that will wait in the wings for a while. It's been waiting for a while already, and can wait a little while longer. The fabrics were a gift from Jacob, who last year hunted for a set of fabrics that would challenge me.
In our friendship, we've adopted the acronym OCP to refer to Iain Banks' penchant for referring to unexpected, difficult problems as "Outside Context Problems." Meaning, problems you simply aren't prepared to solve easily or quickly.
I have never before had to say, "I think I accidentally made a quilt top today." A minor leg injury led to me wanting to stay home and stay off my leg, so what do I do? Pull out my giant bag of scrap fabric strips from equilter.
I've been fascinated by string quilts for a while, but lots of them look alike. I wanted to do something a little bit different. It occurred to me that the piles of fabric strips were the equivalent of crayons in a box ... and off I went.
Current plan is to sash these blocks generously, and probably in white.
As promised, here's the mockup of the White Librarian quilt. It, too, is intended to be a pretty easy little quilt. I'm including a shot of the original quilt for reference. The pattern is called "Bricks and Stones," from redpepperquilts, and is available for sale on etsy. I bought the pattern even though I knew it was for a lap-sized quilt; some knowledge of multiplication tables and Adobe Illustrator would fix the rest of the problem.
I tried to stay pretty true to the pattern, because I really like it.
I've been mulling this one over for a while. Adam has always had such a strong, clean, simple design aesthetic, and as a result I ripped up more designs for this quilt than any other I've ever attempted.
Everything was too complicated.
A year ago I learned how to make itty bitty stars. They were okay, but not great. My skills have improved since that time. I've learned the basics of appliqué. I feel more confident in my construction ability.
When we were over at Hallie and Remy's a few months back, she asked if she could show me something. When we went to the back bedroom, she pulled out two sets of quilt squares. One was hexagons** and the other squares. There were 29 squares in all, not enough for a full adult-sized quilt, and she wondered if anything could be done with them. I said yes.
I'm hoping nobody minds that I do this, because this is old news to anyone who has been reading my sporadic entries this year, but I wanted to make a single, combined post about my quilt 'star stories' for an online quilt festival. It seems there is an online quilting community, of which I am not really part of. Perhaps it is time.