The Start of Something New!

Don't you just LOVE starting a brand new project? One you're excited about? Well, back near the beginning of March (and the beginning of my blog), I wrote a little about a plan my friend Patty and I had to design a semi-patriotic red, white, and blue applique quilt. If you click here, she explains the basic premise, and you can see the first block she designed--which she got started on right away. We're each planning to design six blocks and share the patterns, so we'll end up with a total of 12 blocks, 10" each, set on point.

Since that time, several things have intervened to keep us from getting the project underway--my parents' accident and Patty's insane overtime hours for the most part. I finally had a few free hours tonight when I wasn't trying to meet some deadline (self-imposed or otherwise), so I stopped on the way home from work and bought a drawing pad and got busy on my design. Having to design on a sheet of paper is a new experience. Although I often design my own blocks, I draw them directly onto freezer paper for applique. Anyway, here's what I came up with:

At this stage, it's just the outline, but I'm envisioning that the pansies in my block will be done in blues, ranging from light blue to a deeper purple blue. The flags will be--what else?--flag colors. I think the flower pot will want to be a golden brown. And the ribbon will be red. I haven't put any leaves into my design because I wanted mostly pansies, but I might tuck a couple in so that they're peeking out just a bit if I need some separation and definition between the flowers. And I think I'm going to move the whole thing down just a tad so it's better centered on the block, but we'll see--I'll cut my background larger and center it that way.

Tomorrow night I have a Thimbleberries Club meeting, but I think I might spend the rest of the week working on this block. I should be able to finish it by the end of the weekend, but I need to make the drive up to see my mom on Saturday and run her around town--she's being discharged from the nursing home tomorrow and will need to take care of a number of things. My dad's another story altogether and we're starting to think he may not come home at all, but that remains to be seen.

Do you ever look back at a quilt you made and mentally link it to something going on in your life at the time you made it? I have a large quilt I was working on at the start of our present war and I always remember making the pinwheel blocks for that quilt and watching CNN, seeing the bombings and the troops being deployed with their embedded reporters--very different from anything we had seen before. Since this new quilt will be a fairly long project, I can't help but wonder if I'll associate it with the changes in my parents' lives and whatever arises from their accident--changes that may deeply affect our family--or whether other things will come along that will be linked in my memory to this quilt. Even though the memories may be bittersweet at times, I love the idea that a quilt can be a tangible reminder of a certain time in someone's life, don't you?