Here I Am!

Well it's been awhile. Two months in fact. I won't bore you with the tiresome details of my enforced break. Suffice to say that I was very busy with un-blogworthy matters, and prevented from doing any projects that require right hand strength and stretch.

The designer that lives in my head has been working overtime though, and I've finally had a bit of time to work on the projects I've been dreaming up. Hopefully I'll be able to share a summer's worth with you over the next few weeks.
First up I saw this fabric in the Hawthorne Threads newsletter a few months back and fell instantly in love. It's called Pretty Petals and is from Sylvia Vassileva's "Silvias Garden" collection from P&B Textiles.

To this focus print I added five prints from the collection

Plus a couple of additional prints that I thought worked

and five coordinating solids

I stared at that stack for a few weeks before I started to get some ideas. I kept thinking about how traditional log cabin blocks start with a red center. In this post I wrote "many histories suggest that the log cabin was an American design inspired by the western movement onto the prairie. The traditionally red center block represented the hearth, and the light values on one side represented the sunny side of the log cabin, while the darker values represented the shady side. "

That image appealed to be, but I wanted a more modern twist.

This is the block I came up with.

And here is the design for the quilt top - - ten of those blocks interspersed with larger and longer blocks to create a bit of a puzzle. When finished it should measure about 46 by 62. Plenty big enough to snuggle under on the couch.

I haven't basted, quilted, or bound this one yet, but I'm happy with the way the quilt top and back came together, and once I had it laid out on paper, it was amazingly quick to assemble. The only tricky part is that the I used the partial seam method throughout. Some quilters may be intimidated by this trick for piecing off-set blocks like these, but it's really pretty straightforward. Laura Nownes has a great tutorial in her free Craftsy Block of the Month class.

I'm still not sure about the backing though. Too bold? Too much flower power? I do think the top calls out for an orderly quilt design - perhaps some simple rows of straight stitching. There aren't many spots where two lines meet, if you know what I mean, so straight rows might fight the design. I'll have to give that more thought. Now if I just had a snappy name for the pattern. Ideas?