First Project of the New Year

Over on the 15 Minutes of Play blog Victoria has been showing us her intuitive piecing and encouraging us to play along. I've actually been intuitively piecing since I read Gwen Marston's book Liberated Quiltmaking (first edition) in the late '90's. Most recently my projects have involved a lot of precision piecing. Watching Victoria play had me itching to get back to the intuitive work. Victoria even played matchmaker and paired me up with Janet so we could have the opportunity of working with each other. We're going to each make a 12.5" block and exchange them. Then I'll add to her block and she'll add to mine, in whatever way feels best. At this point we're not thinking beyond just this first exchange. There's no telling how big these blocks will end up!

So, as I've been thinking about this project the question was which scraps to play with? I have plenty to choose from. There's this pile, which includes scraps I received from V in a recent scrap swap.



There's my wicker basket of decades-old scraps. In the photo below there's a plastic bin of strips sitting on top of the scraps.

Then there's the pile of scraps that's been accumulating on the corner of my sewing table while I've been working on recent projects.

The trouble is that I'm pretty tired of most of those prints and colors. I wanted to work with something new and different. It has taken me several days to come to that realization. Today I remembered the darling skunk print LeeAnn was so generous to share with me. And then I thought of other vintage prints I've acquired. Pretty soon I had this little pile on my table:

Not a bad start. For Christmas I bought myself - ahem, I mean Mrs. Claus gave me - a bundle of off-cuts from eQuilter.com. Every cut was a surprise. A lot of them were novelty prints. I've only prewashed about half of them so far but there were a couple of those strips I thought would also work with these vintage prints.

So this is the palette I'm going to start with. Now it's just a matter of sitting down at the sewing machine and digging in. :- )