Circular

This is the block I was trying to explain yesterday:

  

I propped that block up on my sewing machine to take the photo, which is why it's all wonky.  As you can see, each circle block is made up of four quarter blocks made from different fabrics. I have two quarter blocks of each fabric and I'm going to mix them throughout the quilt, each circle made of a set of four different fabrics.

The fabrics are: In the upper right, a print of girls and cats climbing trees that I bought when I first returned to sewing in 2016 or 2017. The other fabrics are newer. In the upper left is a multi-colored tanuki print from Japan. (Tanuki are Japanese racoon dogs that in Japanese mythology are shape-shifting tricksters with giant testicles. Tanuki statues, always wearing hats but bare testicled, are popular in Japan and often displayed outside homes and businesses.) The two fabrics on the bottom, the cherry blossoms against a blue sky and the bokeh lights are custom print jobs from Spoonflower. That bokeh fabric is something else, huh?

 

This is the other block I've finished so far:

The underwater swimmers and the tumbling sumo wrestlers are both from Japan. The octopus print came from a local fabric store. The "Feminist Killjoy" print is custom from Spoonflower. I wanted to make masks from it during the pandemic, but before I could KF94 and other KN85 and N95 masks became available and cloth masks went out the window.

This is the kind of thing The Brain likes to mull over while I sew:

The full circle blocks are big, eighteen and a half inches square. They'll be eighteen inches once they're in the quilt, so here's the next decision: Do I make the quilt three circles by four circles (twin size) or four circles across and five circles down (double size) or do I make it five by six (very large queen size)? We'll have to see how long The Brain puts up with the exacting process of sewing these blocks together. The Brain tends to equate exacting with tedious and it hates tedious, so I can't make any promises that the quilt will ever be more than a twin size. It may end up being a three by three wall hanging. (These blocks really are very tedious to sew!)

It's nice to pet some of my fabrics though! I have some amazing fabrics. Look:

Custom print from Spoonflower.

I collect Virgin Mary fabrics.

Frida face, a recent acquisition.

I have a big collection of skull and skeleton fabrics. 

Another recent acquisition from an online clearance sale.

 

This one is from Japan and has drugs with crazy labels on them, like, the syringes are labeled things like "resurrection" and "metamorphosis" and the pills are labeled things like "animal potion" and "smile potion." 

I finished with all seven seasons of 30 Rock and now old episodes of a ridiculous show called Bones play in the background as I sew into the night. (As always, I'm not sleeping.) My house is a mess. The yard is a mess. I'm a mess. But at least I have sewing, a creative outlet that sometimes brings some of the chaos into order.