What do you do when you are stymied about one quilt you are making? Make another one instead! Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on April 30, 2016 at 8:23pm View Blog Hello Campers! Welcome to spring and are you all busy on your quilt projects? I am supposed to be working on my 2nd Daughter, Becky's wedding quilt (they will be married five years next weekend - I am a bit behind) and it has been a challenge from the get-go. We picked out the fabric last spring during a visit to her house in Plano, Texas. Here are the fabrics:Not feeling inspired about this collection AT ALL, I started making her another quilt with another fabric color palette that looked like the hike I took in Yosemite this past Easter weekend with Daughter #1 Jamie and her family - very outdoorsy prints, trees, rocks, water (see previous blog post about digital printed fabric). Everything was hunky dory until in conversation with Jamie I heard myself saying to her, "I can't imagine Becky taking this hike (in a National Park -that's not her thing) like we are." when it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks that the natural theme quilt was more suited to Jamie than Becky and I was making the wrong quilt for that daughter.

Back to the drawing board. So I puzzled over the fabric and came up with a few blocks but I couldn't figure out how to make them work together. The black cool palette did not work with the warm browns. Frustrated, I put it all away and decided to make a quickie quilt for a wedding we attended today for two of my husband's former students, of which the bride was our tenant in one of our rental houses, Courtney and Matthew. Here it is below.

I am calling this quilt "Home Furnishings" because the center is from a sample pack of upholstery material that I found at a local thrift store. The border is wide wale corduroy and the back is faux suede. None of it the cottons I am used to working with. I embellished the quilt with warm autumn colored glass beads about the size of a pea and embroidered the couple's name and wedding date on the reverse. All done in a week. The beads took the longest time, all hand sewn. My message to the happy couple told them that the blocks in the center represent the stability and foundation of marriage. The randomly placed glass beads represent chaos, change and challenge (also all a part of marriage) and the stars in the heavens above. So now that is done and I must go back to the challenging wedding quilt. The pattern in the book that this is based on calls it "She Runs Hot and Cold" but that may be the name of the quilt. Certainly not an appropriate name for a wedding quilt! We will call it the working title... Anyway, I am sure I will figure this conundrum out, eventually! What are you working on? Best, Ginnie