I mostly worked on socks this weekend; I've turned the heel (trying the Band Heel for the first time ever) on the Owl socks. I am also up to the heel flap on the Embossed Leaves socks (which for some reason I keep wanting to call the Cascading Leaves socks).

I also finished the front of Ginger and have begun her back.

I also started the newest quilt - I think I mentioned it before - most of the fabrics are from a collection called "Glam Girls" (ummm...Free Spirit, I think?) I was very annoyed to find that two of the important fat quarters were either slightly undersize, or because they were cut wonky, I couldn't get all the pieces I needed out of them. The good news is I had another fat quarter in similar colors, with a design that will coordinate okay. So the quilt will be a little more "scrappy" than planned.

It's going to be a pinwheel quilt. I may live to regret that because there will be a lot of bias seams to sew, and in the past, the bias and I, we are not good friends.

(briefly channeled The Manolo there for a moment...)

I also did buy a few things this weekend even though this is supposed to be Use what you Have month. Bought some more fabric - couldn't resist a piece that was on sale - it was a print of old, Victorian cards with forget-me-nots. The color scheme is yellow and blue, and as I have just over four yards of it, it should make a backing on a smallish quilt. (I have some other blue-and-yellow fabrics stashed somewhere that I keep intending to do something with.)

I also bought a copy of this (40% off coupon at Jo-Anns). Super inspirational - I love the "modern quilt" style, I've decided, because a lot of the quilts are more about letting the fabric and the color scheme shine than they are about having you make 282 identical blocks with 18 little pieces each, and matching seams and points and all that jazz. I want to make the cover quilt (called "zipper") and another one called "Marquee" that's in there. (I totally see Marquee made out of Civil War reproduction fabrics - oooh, I think I even have a couple of good "focus fabrics" for the patches). There's another very plain one that's designed to be made out of all solid colors, but I think I'd like to do it out of some textured/batik fabrics instead.

A lot of the blocks are either one-patch type blocks, or are based on simple patterns. As I said, the choice of the colors is what shines - not the technical "fussiness" of the quilt. And for me, my favorite parts of making a quilt are planning it out, and then sewing the whole thing together, not lots of fussy detailed cutting. And especially not lots of fussy pinning and matching, and ripping out when points get "chopped" off by a seam. There's less fussiness to the modern quilt style. And yet - oddly - they don't look SO modern to me that they leave me cold - there's almost a sort of 1930s ethos about some of the quilts - I think it's the color scheme. And some of them, with their more improvisational style, remind me of southern-U.S. African-American quilts I've seen.

So it excites me - it's like having a whole new language to speak with my fabrics, a language that feels good in my mouth (to continue the metaphor), one without fiddly gender-assignments-to-inanimate-objects or strange verb tenses I can never quite grok. It almost feels like a language I spoke long, long ago and almost forgot...