A serendipity quilt. Danielle contacted me to offer me a stack of books of drapery and upholstery fabric. I learned how to take the books apart, and used a steam iron to remove the paper backing from the samples, then washed everything on hot to get rid of as much glue residue as possible.

['Huge. Industrial. Staples.']

['Unsure if pile is big enough.']

Along the way, I noticed the colors fit the theme of a sunrise -- deep blues, tans, golds, reds, purples.

Red sky at morning, sailor's warning.

More photos and explanations as the quilt develops.

Major update, August 7

This is just a quick little entry for a quick little quilt. I'm going to make a few simple, easy lap-sized quilts for our living room, so we can discard a couple of old polyester blankets that have outlived their natural lifespan. I'm wanting to spend more time practicing my quilting, so having a few quilts that I'm keeping means I can practice my stitching on a non-critical project -- I have two coming up that are heavily dependent on the quality of the quilting stitches, and I needed some practice time.

The name? Don't read anything into it. While Jacob was visiting this weekend, I showed him my stash of Liberty fabrics. I love their classic pattern 'Strawberry Thief,' and while I was driving him to the airport he mused, "I wonder if there is a kissing thief?"

"I think there is now!" I responded.

This is another quilt that will wait in the wings for a while. It's been waiting for a while already, and can wait a little while longer. The fabrics were a gift from Jacob, who last year hunted for a set of fabrics that would challenge me.

In our friendship, we've adopted the acronym OCP to refer to Iain Banks' penchant for referring to unexpected, difficult problems as "Outside Context Problems." Meaning, problems you simply aren't prepared to solve easily or quickly.

So, what he bought for me was food fabric. Lots of food fabrics. Berries, fruits, vegetables, all intended to be 'blender' fabrics to bridge a gap between one color and another. Instead, they were my focus fabrics.

['Eat this quilt']

A Penrose tiling is an aperiodic tiling consisting of only two tiles and containing five-fold symmetry. The wikipedia entry for Penrose tilings has good images and information about it, plus a couple of photos that help you see how the pattern might look when colored in.

I am aware of the existence of a few small Penrose quilts, but from examining the photos it looks like they contain at most three iterations of the tiling. Not surprising -- it's hard to find images to work from that have more than three iterations. I had to install Inkscape and use the instructions on this page to render out seven iterations of the pattern, but it's in readiness for when I decide to tackle the pattern.

I have never before had to say, "I think I accidentally made a quilt top today." A minor leg injury led to me wanting to stay home and stay off my leg, so what do I do? Pull out my giant bag of scrap fabric strips from equilter.

I've been fascinated by string quilts for a while, but lots of them look alike. I wanted to do something a little bit different. It occurred to me that the piles of fabric strips were the equivalent of crayons in a box ... and off I went.

Current plan is to sash these blocks generously, and probably in white.

As promised, here's the mockup of the White Librarian quilt. It, too, is intended to be a pretty easy little quilt.  I'm including a shot of the original quilt for reference.  The pattern is called "Bricks and Stones," from redpepperquilts, and is available for sale on etsy. I bought the pattern even though I knew it was for a lap-sized quilt; some knowledge of multiplication tables and Adobe Illustrator would fix the rest of the problem.

I tried to stay pretty true to the pattern, because I really like it.

This, too, is a quilt I intend to keep. The fabrics were a gift to me from Jacob, and were all chosen with me in mind. It is intended as a companion to the Red Librarian quilt.

This is the placeholder for Adam and Brenda's wedding quilt. It has a name, though I'm strangely hesitant to say it yet. This quilt is by far the most technically difficult quilt I've ever attempted, and I anticipate I'll work on some easier, snack-food quilts on the side during its construction to help keep me sane.

When we were over at Hallie and Remy's a few months back, she asked if she could show me something. When we went to the back bedroom, she pulled out two sets of quilt squares.  One was hexagons and the other squares.  There were 29 squares in all, not enough for a full adult-sized quilt, and she wondered if anything could be done with them. I said yes.

A few months later, she announced she was pregnant with her first child.  (A girl, or so the ultrasounds say so far.)  I don't remember who suggested the idea of turning these unfinished squares into a quilt for her baby, but it seemed right and perfect. I took the squares but wasn't sure what to do.  The fabrics are old, but I don't know how old, and they have that aged cream-and-tan patina that only comes with aged cotton.  Modern prints would look out of place and jarring, and white would only make the fabrics look even more aged than they already were.