In which I am aware of the passage of time

May 27, 2010 (This is an email between myself and Cherri. My words are in blue, and Cherri's are red).

Dear Ms. Leaving on a Jet Plane,

While cleaning my very messy studio, I found my copy of Dear Jane and an accompanying CD. You wanna borrow them for the summer? I was so surprised to uncover them in this mess...you probably don't need them, but I thought I would ask. Now back to cleaning.

Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie! I would LOVE to have this for the summer. I'm beyond interested in Dear Jane. Yay! Jill tells me that you are going to the Friday night sewcial at MD, so maybe a hand off there? I'm going too.

Guess what? I'm up to 100 blocks! It's getting a bit impossible to lay them all out in my place. Maybe I'll sneak down to the meeting room of my building once I hit 104 for a photo.

I did take a photo of the blocks on my "design wall", which is really just a leftover Happy Birthday banner I never took down.



You've seen the three on the right, but the rest are new. (Also new are the 7 behind the green block on the far left).

I've also been working to create digital versions of all of them so I can easily look at layouts. I was bummed to realize that sashing in the same neutral as the blocks really won't work. So many of these blocks are asymmetrical, and the detail would be lost. I think maybe a light gray with the neutral setting blocks might be the way to go. I'm also playing around with a boarder of flying geese, as I think it is a nod to the original triangles. Nothing has come to mind for the triangles, so I think that means something, at least in terms of my creative process. I have a bad habit of thinking of a block right before drifting off, so I have to wake up and write it down, but nothing has come in regards to the border.

Anyway, here is a potential layout. The black blocks are all blocks in waiting, so to speak.

On the day of this email, I had less than a month to finish this quilt top. Cherri had even less time before she left for Alaska for the summer. When we met up later at Modern Domestic for the Friday night social, she was bravely starting a new project, which she said she would complete when she came back in the fall.

One thing about making this quilt is that I'm discovering what kind of crazy I am. I mean, I'm some sort of crazy for even doing it, but I seem to have developed little rituals associated with the quilt. I have to make the blocks in order, one color at a time. I also have to keep them in order. They seem to have orientations too, and when one gets put back the "wrong way" I have to fix it. All these orders are made up, but they need to be just so.