Blossom Season

Date: 
17 March 2020 to 20 April 2020
Recipient: 
Jakob and Brooke's kids
Pattern: 
Improv squares
Level of completion: 
Completed and given away

We made it home from the UK on what felt like the last flight out. While there were other flights leaving Heathrow, the airport was mostly deserted. We arrived home from our abbreviated European trip exhausted and emotional wrecks.

The coronavirus pandemic emptied Heathrow.Heathrow international terminal, empty

We weren't sure we'd get home. California isn't Oregon, but we're at least on the right continent.American soil, holy shit we made it

Both of us sat at home, more than a little stunned at the changes in our country since we'd walked into the Portland airport a little over a week earlier. We couldn't go anywhere, and our city was shutting down around us, so I reached for the only coping mechanism I had: I started digging around in my sewing room for something to sew. I pulled out the set of squares I'd cut as part of my scrap-the-scraps project last year, and I started slapping squares on the wall to see what happened next. I kept staring at these pieces, though, and thinking I think there's the basis of a design here...

I remember liking the captions on the fabric when I cut it into square scraps; it ended up providing the name for the quilt.Blossom the first season

Everything I put on the wall just didn't work, so I gave myself a challenge: I pulled out the yellowest squares I had, and asked myself "what would look happy with these squares?" As I put more and more of them on the wall, a theme started to emerge: light, bright, happy, gentle. Like spring daffodils.

Could this work? Possibly. Gotta balance out those bright yellows, though.Blossom Season, first test

I had the top assembled within a day - seriously, it's all straight lines, and never underestimate the speed involved in stress sewing - and moved to the plans for the sibling quilt Summer Twilight, which I'll document next.

There. Now to get the sibling quilt top done, and handle quilting them in tandem.Blossom Season, completed top

For quilts intended for siblings, I liked the similar-but-not-same touch, especially when coupled with two non-gendered colors. Whose is whose? No idea. They can sort it out as they get older.

Blossom SeasonBlossom Season
 Summer TwilightSummer Twilight

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