Fabric Sketches and Birthdays

Thank you to everyone for your sparkling Happy Birthday wishes! I turned an ever-youthful thirty-four on Tuesday, 26 May, and it was a wonderful day. The funniest thing about my birthday these days is that Mr. Sparkles’s birthday is the day after on 27 May. (Say hello in the comments!) Can you imagine two Geminis together for ten years? No wonder I have a split personality!

I’ve been contemplating my next big project a lot, so I’ve been a bit creatively restless. Making a quilt is obviously a big commitment, and after finishing up two queen-sized quilts recently, I’m just feeling hesitant. To that end, I’ve started playing around with various scraps to see if anything strikes my fancy. These aren’t the fabrics I would use, nor these colours, just playing around more with technique and composition at the moment. Let’s just call them fabric sketches.

Then this big scrap heap is a 15″ x 18″ block made from all the crazy left overs from the Lost Feathers of an Angel quilt. If you’ve made those AMH feathers, you know the shardy scraps you get from the strip sets after you cut out the feather shapes. I couldn’t throw all that fabric goodness away so I sewed it all back up into this mess. I’m thinking of slicing it on the diagonal, adding a neutral, and turning it into two throw cushions. More matchstick quilting: yes.

I know you’ve seen hundreds of these before! Of course it is Carolyn Friedlander’s Shirts pattern, and I’m so excited I finally made one! This was only my test block, as I’ve got a very special and sensitive project coming up using this pattern. I kind of want my own quilt of shirts now too though. Ugh, must make all the things! 

So yeah, as you can see, my birthday brings a lot of random things. It feels good to spit out ideas into fabric though, otherwise my brain might just explode glitter all over the place. Now wouldn’t you like to see that!?