What's Up in the Sewing Room

I finished the Chairman Meow quilt two days ago, but I did not get a photo of the finished quilt. I washed and dried it, showed it to Dave. He helped me fold it up (it's big, a large queen size) and then it was put away. 

After a day, I started making blocks for my next quilt. My plan for this next quilt is to cut into the fabrics that I have that I hesitate to cut into because the prints are so big. Big prints are beautiful, which is why I collect them--but they don't tend to play well with other fabrics. Big print fabrics have to be the main character (or so they tell you). I've decided instead to put my big prints together into one quilt, so I'm making quarter circle blocks using big prints against neutral gray backgrounds.

Here's an example block:

I've had that octopus fabric for about seven years (maybe longer). I liked it and the store only had a quarter yard of it left, so I bought it and then never used it. Now it's going into this quilt. Each quarter circle will be a different big print and four quarter circles will come together to make one circle with four different prints. Sounds chaotic when I write it out. We'll see.

The blocks are cut with a two-part template (which is normally used to make a kind of quilt called a Drunkard's Path)--the quarter circle itself and the background. 

The quarter circles look like this:

Some prints are directional, like the "Feminist Killjoy" print in pink and I want to maintain the correct orientation in the final quilt. Some prints are not directional (called "tossed" by the fabric manufacturers), like the taco print or the bokeh print, and those will mix with the directional prints to make up the circle blocks. 

I am cutting two quarter circles from each fabric. I have ten different fabrics so far--but twenty quarter-circle blocks. My plan is to divide the blocks into two identical groups and make two quilts, one where the resulting circles barely touch each other and one where the circles are about two inches apart. (It sounds more confusing than it is.)

So that's what's up in the sewing room right now.