Humming Along to Willie Nelson Songs

For those of you who don’t know much about me, I live on the windblown prairies of Saskatchewan,which means that most of the time it’s darn-near impossible to take a decent quilt photograph outside. In those rare moments of stillness I will race outside with my camera, a pocket full of clothespins, and a basket of quilt blocks or an actual quilt, just to take advantage of a photo opportunity. The rest of the time I must settle on those weirdly unpredictable inside pictures where the colours are often dark and distorted or completely washed out by the flash of the camera.

Today was a perfect day! I took a chance, piled up lots of blocks and finished quilts, and spent the afternoon on a quilt shoot. The little collection of blocks I’m showing today is part of my red and white sampler quilt with the working title “for all the quilts I’ve loved before”.

A while back I realized that no matter how long I lived, I would never have enough time to make every single quilt that is on my to-do list and it led to this somewhat brilliant idea of selecting some favourites from that list of quilts, making a few blocks to get it out of my system, and stockpiling them until there are enough for an entire quilt. Even though the blocks will all be different sizes and styles, I chose to keep them in a simple, mostly red and white, colour scheme to create a sense of unity and continuity throughout the final quilt. I suppose the difficult task will come when piecing them together, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I’m having great fun browsing through old magazines that are stuck with post-it notes, searching for all those quilts I’ve loved over the years but haven’t made yet. It feels as though I’m reminiscing or documenting my quilt-love history and it is very satisfying to make one block (or sometimes more) out of the blue just because.

as always, carol