This is the most recently finished quilt top. It's one of those "I like it better and better the more I look at it" tops:
Not a great photo, but it was taken Sunday evening, and it was windy here, and I decided that going out and trying to photograph it on the clothesline would be an exercise in frustration.
This is the "Little Man" quilt from Camille Roskelly's "Simplfy" book. It's designed for four fat quarters (though, as I said, the ones I had were less generously-sized than what the pattern apparently called for, so I had to press a couple other small bits into service as the narrow strips in the center of the blocks.
The fabric is (mostly) that Tufted Tweets fabric I bought last year...I think of it more as "Birds and Chairs" because, if you look closely, you can see tiny yellow, black, and pale violet birds in some of the fabrics:
I was chuckling to myself when I finished it, because I thought, "Now if I lived in Portland, I could call this an art quilt"
As I've said before: I don't so much think of my quilts as "art." I suppose that's because I tend to be more traditional in my style (even if I am doing what might be considered a "modern quilts" pattern). And art quilts tend to be made to hang on the wall and look at, rather than wrap around yourself. And also, I get the feeling that art quilts need to have some kind of meaningful message, and the message of most of my quilts is, "I really liked this fabric."
So there you have it. Not to take anything away from the art quilters - and some have done things like raise awareness (and I think, money) for Alzheimer's research and suchlike. But I prefer to make quilts that are primarily meant to be used as quilts.
Perhaps that's because I spend all day most days talking...and I spend the time I'm not in class trying to write manuscripts...and so, in my free time, I want to make something that's just pretty and useful.
Although, I don't know, maybe "This is pretty and useful and it makes me happy" is an okay statement for a quilt to make. Or, if you're doing one as a gift for someone, or as a donation to Project Linus or a nursing home or a women's shelter or somewhere, the statement of "I want you to be warm and comforted by this." That's a pretty good statement for a quilt to make, and is good enough for me and my quilts.
Anyway. I wasn't sure I'd like this quilt as I was working on it. At first, my reaction was: too much of the same color (magenta), it's going to be meh. Then I thought that the yellow I chose for the sashing would fight with the magenta. (Funny: the spellchecker in Firefox does not recognize "sashing" as a word. Well, it also chokes when I try to write "Pegasus" as starting with a lower case p).
But I persisted. And as often happens, when I started sewing the blocks together, the quilt started to look better and better. (No, I don't think it's purely a psychological, "I'm almost done with it" thing). I put the borders on (both fabrics from the stash - which is why I like having an extensive stash, I can almost always find something that works for a project I'm planning). And I decided I really liked it. In fact, I think I will wash up the backing fabric I bought, piece together the backing, and take it down this week to see if I can get it in the queue to be quilted.
It's a small quilt - it's about 40" wide (I can tell, because I could get an entire border out of the width of fabric, and most fabrics now are 40" to 42" after you remove the selvedges) and maybe 48" long.
As the pattern-author noted, you could make a larger quilt by making more blocks: you get roughly four blocks (well, four blocks minus one of the narrow strips) from one fat quarter, so you could easily scale up based on how many blocks you wanted. Or you could make it scrappier...I think the big pieces had a finished size of 4" by 6" (cut 4 1/2" by 6 1/2"), so you could go through a bunch of scraps and make the blocks all different prints. If you used novelty type prints, you could make an I Spy quilt for a child....all kinds of animal prints, or vehicle prints, or what have you.
I could see doing this one again in different colors and maybe two rows of blocks wider and a couple longer, to make more of a "napping" quilt, because it's a fun pattern and a good one for using novelty fabric. (And one thing my stash demonstrates, it's that I never met a novelty fabric I didn't like). You could also get a totally different look by using different fabrics for the "sashing," so each block looked more like an individual separate block, rather than small blocks "floating" in the sashing.
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