A little side project...

Thank you so much for all of your wonderful birthday wishes! They really did make my birthday special, which was much welcomed since I ended up getting the plague a couple days before. Nice timing, right? Anyway, being sick didn't (for the most part) keep me from enjoying what turned into my birthday week. Because it fell on a Wednesday and on a class night at that (more on that below), it worked out best for B and I to go out for dinner Friday...which coincidently coincided with San Diego's Restaurant Week (YUM!). Nasus and K also whisked Nonnahs and I away for a little wine getaway last weekend, but I'll let one of them tell you the details. All in all, not a bad way to start out 33.

As for my class, I decided to take a quilting class offered by one of our local quilting shops. I realized last summer when I started making some simple skirts that I couldn't get enough of the fabrics out there. So many colors, so many themes, so many opportunities! But, I just wasn't drawn to garment making. I did, however, find that I got really excited whenever I saw these fabrics in a quilt or a pillow or a 'thing'. This is an interesting fact considering that I am almost completely opposite in the way I feel about knitting, where I almost always choose to knit a garment over a 'thing'.

I played around with making a throw this summer on vacation and while I could follow the pattern, I quickly realized that I was in desperate need of the techniques you learn from a class and a teacher. After quite a bit of research, I found a class that was exactly what I wanted. It takes me from picking out the fabric to a finished quilt in 6 weeks.

In the first class we selected our fabrics. Now, I'm a sucker for those cute and coordinated fabric packs that fabric shops sell, but I was determined to learn how to select fabrics outside of a designer's line or collection. So on the first day, I brought a piece of fabric (the cream fabric with the little pastel dots) with me to serve as my inspiration. I had originally purchased it online several months ago to go with another fabric for a skirt. But once it arrived and saw it in person, I knew the two would never work right together. It also isn't a fabric I was likely to wear, so I thought, here's a chance to actually use it!

I knew I didn't want a pastel quilt, so I walked my fabric around the shop until I found something that would bring the pastels into a brighter color pallet...the pretty floral print on the left. With these as my anchors, I found 4 more fabrics that combined fun colors with various stylistic elements to mix it up a bit. The photo below will show you more or less how the fabrics will look in their relative sizes to each other in the final quilt.

The floral will serve as my large blocks and outer border and the other 5 fabrics as my pieced blocks. I will also use more of the small pastel dots as my inner border and the stripe fabric as my binding around the outside. I think it will provide a nice contrast to the floral border, plus I love the way striped bindings look on quilts :-) .

I'll share some more photos as the quilt starts to come together! I'm really excited to see the blocks done and the top sewn up. Wish me luck!