One Dozen Cousins & One Dozen Quilts
My dad is one of four kids and I have 12 cousins on his side of the family. His mom took up quilting just before the eldest of us started graduating from high school. She decided to make a quilt for each of us as we graduated from high school. I’m grandkid #3. This is the quilt my Grandma made for me:
Well, my Grandma is now 82 and while still capable of so much, including kicking my butt at scrabble and cribbage, she’s not able to quilt. In 2011, my youngest cousin will graduate, and I’m doing her quilt. I’m starting early, because then I can send pictures and bring bits to my Grandma as I go…so she’s in the loop!
My Grandma always let us pick what color we wanted for our quilts, so I did the same for Stinky. Stinky originally said green, but when she and I were in a fabric store later in the day, she kept pulling out turquoise and orange bolts (her room is done in those colors, too). So, I’m think I’m going with orange and turquoise with a bit of green and pink mixed in and some solids in various colors so it doesn’t look too candy and twee in the end.
Here’s my fabric stack as of a few week ago:
made some progress on this since then…will fill you in with another post soon.
Here’s the plan:
That’s my sketch on the left and an image from "Patchwork Style" by Suzuko Koseki on the right. I want to make a queen, so I think I will actually make it 5 blocks x 5 blocks, not 3×3. At 3×3 the blocks would have to be over 30 inches wide. I want to play with big blocks, but I think 20-inchers will be big enough!
What I’m copying from the Patchwork Style image is the idea to mix darks with darks and lights with lights. In the Patchwork Style quilt, the center is dark and the outside light or vice versa. Awesome idea. I’m going to do more switches in most of my blocks and keep the warms and darks separate, which you can tell from the sketch.
This, by the way, is Stinky at age five. I dressed her up like that (boots, peignoir) and made her run around outside in the cold fog so I could play with my new camera (my first SLR, the CANON EOS Elan IIe). Ah, cousins, I love them.
