Quilting

Really?  You're turning a perfectly good adventure blog into a crafting blog?  What is this "Quilting" post doing here?
Yeah, well.  There will be adventures aplenty, but sometimes, the cold weather makes people do weird things.  Speaking of, I'm rather enjoying quilting right now.

So, within the past year, I've been figuring out how to use my fancy new sewing machine by making this:

for my sister and these:

for my mom.

Now that I've successfully (cough) made one large lap quilt where everything (pattern, colors, etc) is handed to me, I'm taking the logical next step by doing pretty much everything for myself.  Because, ya know, that's going to be easy.  After a frustrating hunt through online quilt patterns and really pricey-materialed-good-looking patterns from a quilt book, I decided that I wanted to make my own sampler quilt. Thus began a pretty quick search for quilt blocks that look like fun and a slightly longer quest to sketch out how I'm going to piece the quilt together.

I really liked this one pinwheel quilt that I found on Google images, especially the way that different sized blocks are pieced together.  I'm planning on using three different sizes of squares (this will help me do both simple and pretty complex blocks) and no sashing.  I'm hoping that I can use different color themes to separate the blocks, but this quilt will just be for picnicking and/or use around the house.

Once I got a plan laid out, I started fussing over colors.  I received one of the Moda charm square packs for Christmas, and though using pre-packaged colors is apparently "rookie" and "doesn't have that extra something," I'm using my pack as a guide anyways.  (So there internet!)  I set aside a lot of the earthy greens and brown for some other project, and pulled the blues, brighter greens, purples, red-oranges, and some neutrals for my quilt.  I supplemented those colors with some similar fat quarters (more Christmas presents) and a couple half yards of neutrals from the local quilting shop.  Hopefully the colors will work the way I hope they will.

Anyhow, I'll try to keep track of some (all?) of the blocks that I make for the quilt, and I'll make sure to at least show ya'll the finished project.