In Progress

Well, I may be in a "not so much on the sewing" phase of my life, but the good news is, as long as human beings keep procreating there will be something pulling me back to the sewing machine...

Case in point, another quick and messy baby quilt I am attempting to make. Let me preface this by saying that the baby is due, like, tomorrow or something. But whatever.

The baby, upon his or her birth, will belong to a co-worker from the shelter and his wife, who I have seen a couple time post-Texas and who are all around cool cats. I plan to keep the quilt gender neutral. My original inspiration: the southwest. They have both spent time in the southwest and have a lot of southwestern accents in their house, so it seemed appropriate.

Months ago I pulled a bunch of southwestern/folk art inspired prints, as well as some coordinating tonals. I could not, however, for the life of me come up with a vision of what I wanted to do. So, the fabric kind of sat there and nothing actually happened for a long time. This is probably part of the reason the "in progress" post is coming like a day before the baby is due.

Anyway, I toyed with the idea of just forgetting it and not making anything. Then after a while I remembered a pile of charm squares I had sitting around somewhere that have nothing to do with the southwest, but that I might be able to throw together into something interesting. So I got them out.

I had gotten about this far:



when I discovered that most of the rest of the squares were blue! Doesn't work so well for an allegedly gender neutral quilt. Unfortunately, that little bit is only 18x27, not quite enough.

Then, in a fortuitous moment, one of the fabrics in the southwest/folk art pile caught my eye:



Although "they" say you shouldn't make a border wider just to make a quilt bigger, I'm thinking I quite like the affect of a wide border here. Anyway, it's a big print, so a wide border is kind of needed to show it off. I think it works. (It probably won't be _quite_ that wide, as I think that's 10 or 12 inches in the picture.)

Or does it? Maybe it's a little too crazy. Maybe only a mother could love it. Not sure yet. But I'm going with it!