Larkspur

I finally started cutting on a new quilt design today. This one has been a long time coming. About eighteen months ago I saw Alexander Henry's Larkspur collection in the indigo colorway and fell in love with it. I knew right away that I wanted to include it in a new quilt for our bedroom, but feared the flowers and scale might be a bit much for hubby. Those birds are about six inches long. I decided to only order a few yards of various prints in the collection, and to make up the rest of the quilt with solids and a modern design to keep it from looking too girly swirly.

I had this image in my head of the pretty prints suspended in space, all different sizes, kind of like those crazy room dividers we all loved so much in the sixties and seventies.

Sometime in the nineties my Mom asked me if I wanted that HUGE box of chains I had made by connecting soda can pull tabs. My idea, back in high school of course, had been to make a cool room divider out of them. But I digress.

I finally came up with a design that appeals and that isn't a nightmare to assemble. Just a bit over 400 non-moving parts! I was headed down the path of all blues and grays, but as I was auditioning fabric from my seemingly never-ending supply of Robert Kaufman Kona Solids (never-ending because I keep ordering more), I decided to add a few pops of "everglade", "coffee", and "honey" too. Sure hope the prints can pull together the disparate colors.

Here’s the first block! I’m hoping I can find the time to keep working on it and have the quilt top finished in a couple of weeks.

By then the ground will be warm enough to plant some real Larkspur [Delphinium L.] with seed sent to me from a favorite aunt’s garden. By summer there might be all kinds of larkspur blooming around here.