Breathless

I've been having so much fun planning quilts lately that I'm almost breathless. Jane came by for a visit and brought a few projects with her that were in need of a 'consultation', so I was happy to oblige.

She's pairing up this spectacular large floral with pink, yellow and blue nine patches and was looking for ideas on how to lay them out, so we got right into it. She has 13 blocks of the floral and that's it, so we needed to build out from that.

Laying them on the point seems to bring the best out in them so that will be the centre panel ...

and then she's going to pull in two large blue florals for the setting triangles. These will transition into a picot border of blues paired up with a soft yellow that we found in my stash. I didn't get a pic but it's the same print that Jane used in her Danuta's Garden and she still loves it.

Then she pulled out two baggies filled with 106 gorgeous 4.25" blocks. They started out last summer as HSTs with no particular plan - she was just looking for something to hand stitch - and evolved into two sets of lovely blocks, one with purples and one with reds. They are stunning! Again, these are all of the blocks that we had to work with.

So, what to do? Well, we played around in the stash again and found almost 8 metres of this beautiful paisley, circa 1997. It's sort of the colour of allspice and the rich cerise and turquoise just make it sing.

A little more playing and we came up with this design - columns of blocks on the point with setting triangles in the paisley bordered by 1" strips of various colours pulled from the prints (purple, red, teal, etc.). These will be separated by a 4.5" column of the paisley. I'M IN LOVE!!!

You can see where the paisley has a very definite linear pattern (the top triangles run horizontally and the two on the bottom run vertically) but we didn't want to cut the setting triangles along the length of fabric, so she cut 8" blocks, cutting them again into four on the diagonal and will separate them into vertical and horizontal orientations so that she can alternate the column orientations across the width of the quilt. The print for all of the 4.5" paisley columns will run vertically and there should be enough paisley for the backing too.

All of her setting triangles are cut and her HST blocks are now trimmed, so she's off to the races. She'll be sewing them together by hand and is a speedy little thing so I wasn't at all surprised to get a note from her that she already has one and a half columns of the first one together!....M