Heavy Petting

Gosh! When was the last time you heard THAT phrase? Sometime in the 60s, maybe? Am I showing my age?

Well, I can definitely say that I'm old enough now that heavy petting usually involves fabric. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, I wonder? Somehow it reminds me of a tastefully glitter-lettered T-shirt I used to have a long, long time ago that said, "I gave up bowling for sex. The balls are lighter and I don't have to change my shoes." (Yes, I used to bowl on leagues and I wore it then.) Of course, it's not QUITE the same, but you know what I mean, right? No? Moving along then . . . .

So, anyway, guess what came in the mail today? A little package from the fantastic Kimberly Jolly and her crew at the Fat Quarter Shop! That's where the heavy petting comes in.

My friend Eileen gave me a Fat Quarter Shop gift certificate for Christmas which I horded for awhile, but I finally gave in and had a little push button shopping spree last weekend. Now I have a nice assortment of the newest Schnibbles patterns and a couple of yummy pairs of charm square packs. Highly pet-able.

I had really good intentions of sewing the last two floral border strips onto the Thimbleberries applique quilt tonight, but once I opened that little box from Texas, I wasn't able to concentrate on anything but picking out the fabric for this month's Le Petite project, Brocante. I mixed and matched and counted squares and planned. I put fabric back and pulled out more. I finally settled (at least for now, and at least in theory) on the Lovely line by Sandy Gervais with a little bit of fabric from some older fat quarters I had in my stash to round out and supplement the colors I'm a little short of in the charm packs.

I'm planning to use the pinky-orange where the red is in the pattern. The plain centers of the blocks will be yellow where they're surrounded by orange (also yellow in the pattern) and blue where they're surrounded by white (pink in the pattern). And, of course, white where the pattern is white. I think, but I cannot swear because I was too busy petting fabric to actually READ the pattern, that the white background is from additional fabric and not the charm packs, but there are a lot of white/light charm squares in these two charm packs, so I just might be able to use them and make it a bit more scrappy looking than the pattern. I think it will make a nice cheerful little quilt, don't you?

Now I just need to find the time to make it. Perhaps I should spend less time petting and more time doing.

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You know what? Maybe BLACK would look better than white! And maybe if I shifted color placement, the STAR pattern would show up better. Hummmmmm. Maybe I need to think about this a little more. And you know what? I usually think better while I'm petting. . . . . . . . . . . . . .