The Liz Quilt (LizQ) – A Random Project

I had a crappy week at work last week, on the weekend I had the flu , and I was feelin’ blue. So instead of writing a country and western song, I decided to brighten up my Saturday with some seriously bright fabrics and put together the initial blocks for a project I’ve been thinking about for a while. So here’s the story…

Mr Mark forced me to buy a ‘Quilter’s Quips’ panel at a quilt shop when we were on holidays last year. The panel has pictures of a quilter with funny quotes about quilters and quilting on it, and its very colourful. So, it’s the perfect starter for a quilt for a quilter, whose sewing room gets quite cold on winter afternoons. I thought about the fabrics I had and the sewing I’d done before, and I remembered that the first piece of patchwork I ever did was making a cushion for my chair at school when I was all of eight or nine years old. Amazingly, I remembered that the design was called ‘shoe-fly’ (yes, it’s probably supposed to be ‘shoo-fly’ but I remember it as shoe so that’s the way I’ve written it) and was essentially a nine patch block with half-square triangles in each corner. I called my Mum to confer about the design, and she confirmed that this matched her memory of the cushion and that it was red and blue. Mum also mentioned some UFOs she had that she and my grandmothers had started when I was small, so I suspect these may now get handed down for me to finish one of these years as well ;-).

Anyway, so I drew up my shoe-fly design, found some bright pink and turquoise fabric that matched the panel and was still close enough to red and blue. I then remembered that my cushion had a print in the corner triangles, I’m not sure what it was though. So, I dug out a white fabric with small brightly coloured buttons on it and put that on the corners, and put strips of it on each panel section so the blocks are all 9” square when they’re finished.

My next challenge is the borders and balancing the strength of colour in the shoe-fly blocks, but that’ll be the next installment.
Have a great week.
Bert