After obsessively knitting for hours on end, several days in a row, my forearms and wrists informed me that they needed a little break. So, I decided to use up some of my crafting energy on a quilting project that’s been simmering in my imagination for a while.

It’s a project that, while not fully worked out in all of its details, I nevertheless have a good feeling about it — and I feel like I can see clearly the next step to take… even if I’m not entirely sure where it’s all going. This project started life as an impulse purchase of some Mary Engelbreit fat quarters from, of all places, Wal-Mart. My dear friend Jeni is a huge ME fan, so I knew that I’d eventually put the fabrics to good use for some kind of project for her, eventually.

Two or three YEARS later, which brings us to this past holiday season, I was inspired to make a customized dining room tablecloth for Jeni. I figured I buy a large size cloth and make a quilted border to enlarge it. (She has a fabulously long table that’s notoriously difficult to cover with any single tablecloth.) So, I cut some squares and starting thinking about how this would all happen. And, turns out, it didn’t happen at all. Combination of being overwhelmed by too many Christmas crafts, not finding a tablecloth that I liked for the foundation, and just generally getting distracted by other things.

Well, some projects just have a way of letting you know what they need. Turns out that Jeni is moving to a new house in the spring, and in her new house she’s decided to dedicate a spare bedroom to an Englebreit theme, instead of the ME kitchen she’d been planning. So, now those quilt squares are going to find a home in quilt. It’s a potentially bigger project, but a better one, I think.

So. Here’s a look at the array of fabrics, a pile of some about half of the small 3×3 inch squares that I’ve made, and a sample of what the pattern will look like:

The pattern is from my favorite quilting book, Spectacular Scraps, in which all of the designs are based on uniformly sized triangles joined into squares and arranged into all sorts of designs. I love the simplicity of it and the seemingly endless possibilites. I went with this design that forms a series of diamond shapes because I think it compliments the checkered patterns that appear in several of the fabrics. My tentative plan is to go with that until I’ve used up all of my little squares and then I’ll see how big the results are, and decide from there whether to continue at the same size or else create perhaps a large border in some other kind of pattern.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Quilting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.