an accidentally enormous barn-raising

While working with on the last quilt, I couldn't help but fall in love with the Indian Summer prints. Those little foxies! The mountains! The mushrooms and feathers!

Perhaps the hardest thing about sewing something for someone else is that, of course, you have to give the quilt to them when it's finished.

So, in an attempt to make the parting easier, I knew I had to sew something else with the strips and scraps (and other prints from the collection).

In fact, I'd planned to use a lot more prints in the design, but found that a large helping of solids produced the graphic effect I was hoping for. In fact, I'd planned to use so few solids that I began with only one fat quarter of navy -- I was soon back for more, but the original blue I'd used was no longer in stock. And so, knowing that the blues wouldn't all match anyway, I brought home two new shades of navy -- which is now, of course, one of my favourite parts of this quilt; the depth created by several tones of the same colour.

And, in similar "oops!-oh-well-I-like-it fashion", the blocks ended up almost doubly as big as I'd planned -- a whopping 17" instead of 10". This design uses log-cabin blocks in a traditional layout know as a "Barn Raising". Barn Raising quilts often have many concentric diamonds of alternating colours, but here, thanks to the giagantic blocks, the design is enlarged so that two complete diamonds are enough for an entire quilt.  These quilts, they seem to prefer to design themselves!



I've folded it and put this one aside for now, to be tackled after our summer hols, when perhaps I'll have a better idea how to squeeze all this fabric through the tiny little neck of my poor old sewing machine!