Crumb Cake

You may remember the pieces of this quilt from this post a while back. They have been dormant for quite some time whilst I went through a lot of different design options in my head. My original plan was to keep the units small and uneven and sash them with thin black sashing for sort of a mosaic look. I was having too much trouble visualizing that, however, and when I tried to lay it out I did not like how it was shaping up. So the pieces continued to sit while I processed it in some dark corner of my brain and worked on other things. Finally I just decided that the best solution really was to just sew them all together into one big scrap mash up, and this piece is the result. My original fear is that this would dilute the impact somewhat, especially since the quilt uses only three colors so there is not tons of contrast. However, in reality I think it works, and I'm glad to finally have a finished top, as this has been in progress for...forever.

This quilt is sister to this one, and I have one more I'm thinking of doing from the same set of scraps to complete the "quilt family." I guess some people might call it a series.


my favorite bit

I would LOVE to hand quilt this, but I am torn because there are so many small piece and therefore TONS of seams. Some pieces are all seam. And maybe it's because my fingers are sore from my current hand quilting project that wrestling with a million seams doesn't sound fun to me right now. We'll see. I am loving hand quilting (the look of it) more and more these days; it just seems like it adds so much to the finished textile. I have always enjoyed the process, too, of course, but since I know there's no way I can hand quilt everything, I have to be selective about what I choose to work on. I just wish I would hurry up and get better at machine quilting so that maybe I would feel the same way about it, rather than just seeing it as a fast but not very nice way to finish projects.

(Bleh...it seems hardly a post goes by that I'm not apologizing for the quality of the photos, and maybe I should just get over it! However, I hear good photos are not in season right now, and I could not wait any longer to share this! I probably just need to improve my photoshop skills.)

In other news, I know only a few posts ago I was blogging about my new job as a teacher's assistant in a preK. And that has been a fun gig, for sure, and I have enjoyed it. However, I got yet another new job! I will be working as a paralegal in a non-profit agency that assists immigrants and refugees. It is more in the vein of what my long term interests are and is a better opportunity in a lot of ways. So I am excited, even if I am also sad to say good-bye to the preK kids. I am gearing up to relocate to the big city (Chicago) in under a week!! I will be staying with friends when I first go up so it's sort of a "soft" move - I won't be officially moving all my stuff until I figure out a more permanent living arrangement. As a result of the move I would not be surprised if the blog goes quiet for a while. I'm not strictly saying it will, because I hope to still make an effort to post. However, we'll see how it goes!

In the meantime, back to cleaning and packing. This includes more internal wrestling about the amazing volume of fabric I have in my possession and what, if anything, I should do about it. A question that never goes away??