Hunting and Gathering

So as I was approaching the completion of my latest flimsy ("Chicken Soup," to be revealed in full at a later date) I started wondering what project I would tackle next. I have promised my husband a new quilt and have been collecting fabric for it but still am not sure what direction to take.


Then I found out that a friend has been diagnosed with a cancer. One of the group I get together with every other month or so actually. That took my breath away. Then the next day it occurred to me that she might be comforted by a quilt during her chemo treatments, etc. So I called my other two buddies and we formulated a plan.

Each of us will make a vertical panel 18 inches wide by 72 inches long. We'll work in our own style, to our own design, and then sash those three panels together into a single quilt top. My next step was to figure out what to do in my section of the quilt. I thought about D~ and the things I know about her... and finally made the decision to at least work in her favorite colors. There were lots of other little decisions that led to that decision. For example, D~ appreciates traditional quilts but is not particularly fond of really scrappy versions like the ones I've been making lately. Based on that I decided to work in batiks instead of "quilterly" prints. I do, however, want this panel to speak of me so I will use construciton methods I enjoy.

I went to my LQS to see what I could find in her colors in batiks. This is what I came home with:

The lime green is not necessarily D~'s color but it's a favorite of mine and I thought it would be a great accent. The purple on the bottom looked more red in the store. It was to be my main fabric. When it came out of the wash looking more blue than red I had second thoughts about using it. My impression of D~'s favorite color is as a red-violet. What to do, what to do?

Eventually I remembered this batik panel I'd bought years ago with the intention of making an art quilt out of it, a wall quilt.

Wow, that's a really poor photograph. Well anyway, I think it suits D~ perfectly. So now I have a starting point. Not really what I think of as her colors, but maybe I can work them in later on. In the meantime I have pulled these from my stash to begin making blocks.

My plan at this point is to stack and slice and shuffle to make units or blocks that I will then play with until something falls into place. We have given ourselves two months to complete this quilt so I can't afford to dither about trying a bunch of different things. I will build this panel intuitively, feeling my way along. Inbetween I'm going to keep nibbling away at my scraps, using them as leaders and enders and eventually building them up into six inch blocks for future use. I haven't been online much lately but yesterday I stumbled across Victoria's new blog and have signed up to play along. Committing to someone else that I will do something has far more power than merely setting a goal for myself.