story of a quilt

Check out these beautiful blocks I received from The Crafty Scientist! And I'm not just saying that because I now have enough blocks to sew the top together - they are completely gorgeous!



We swapped because I wanted a little more pastel in my quilt - do you see the lavender she put in there? Brilliant! I never would have thought to add that color, but it just works. It works like crazy.

Thanks, Dayna! I can't wait to show how the whole thing comes together!

I can't believe I haven't updated in over a month! Well... maybe I can. It's been pretty eventful around here lately, and some of that has to do with the block I'm showing here.

A few months ago, I signed up to contribute some products to the MTV Style Lounge.. You can read a little more about that here. When I was putting my masks together, I made the pieced mask from half of a block I was going to submit to the swap, but ended up being a little small. That mask is now owned by someone, possibly kind of a famous someone, who went to the Style Lounge, and that's just fun to think about.

The half of the block you can see above is now the middle of this block. I think I've mentioned that I have some mixed feelings about the "improvisational" aesthetic, but there is one thing I love about it, unequivocally: recycled blocks that don't look like recycled blocks.

There's something unbelievably satisfying about - and can you tell I LONG for season three of Project Runway? - making it work. We live in the age of fabric plenty, so there was no reason I needed to reuse this or any other block that fell short, whether in actual size or just not looking quite nice enough to send off to some anxious stranger who has every right to my best work. But I wanted to get this one right. And it's not my favorite block I've done, but I like it a lot. I like it so much, in fact, that I wish I'd thought to rework it in time to send it off to the swap.

Oh, well - lessoned learned, and now I have a block with kind of an interesting history.