So Many Pretty Quilts

Having finished a quilt last week, I am feeling the urge to start another one.  On the one hand, I have plenty of UFOs stacked up in my closet, and I really should tackle another.  On the other hand, I have scads and scads of fabric that needs to be used.  NEEDS to be, I tell you.

Last evening, I pulled the top UFO off of the stack -- a batch of kaleidoscope blocks I'd started piecing last spring but then life interrupted and it got set aside -- and in one evening I got the whole top pieced together.  (Photos to come once I've got it ironed!)  So I've moved that from "the UFO" pile to the "to be quilted" pile (they're different in my mind. And yes, I know it's not finished if it's not quilted.  But still.  It's my system and it's working for me. Ahem)  

So, with one totally finished quilt, and a finished quilt top under my belt (in the same week! Fanfare, please!), I figured that I was justified in choosing a new scrap quilt project to a) use up a bit of my fabric collection and b) prepare a good piecing project or two for my upcoming quilt retreat in early October.  I settled down in bed with my Ipad to look at the scrappy quilts I've pinned on Pinterest to get me thinking.  Oh my.  So many pretty quilts.  Which direction to go in?

Maybe scrappy equilateral triangles, like this one by Rita at Red Pepper Quilts.  She has the best, best sense of color and pattern and every time she posts a quilt on her blog, I want to make it.

Or maybe I should just start making half square triangles with my scraps -- there are so many great quilts to make with scrappy HST blocks, like this sort of thing:

Or maybe something a little bit more complex.... like this quilt, called "Ups and Downs," designed by Sarah Fielke of Material Obsessions fame... It's really just 4-patches alternating with a flying geese sort of block... but so interesting!

I keep stumbling into pictures of this quilt block, called Flowering Snowball, and I'm clearly drawn to it as I seem to have pinned various examples of this quilt.  So fresh, so scrappy.  It requires a particular template, but that'd be okay.  And maybe the curved piecing would be a good project for retreat sewing -- not boring but easy enough to combine with chatting and such.

And even thought I've made several flying geese quilts lately, I continue to be drawn to them.  So maybe it'd be fun to make another. (This pretty one is made by Rita at Red Pepper Quilts.) Cutting the geese parts with the Go Cutter makes it so, so easy and fast.

Oh!  And then I've been wanting to do this -- a charm quilt with Liberty of London squares interspersed with a low volume neutral.  This one, yep -- Rita again -- just takes my breath away.  I'll confess that I spent some time looking at buying charm squares of Liberty cotton but then I remembered that the point here was to use up fabric I have, not buy more.  Sigh.  So this will go on a back burner.

And take a look at this!  It's a quilt block design called "X and +" and seems to be based on a Japanese quilt that was displayed at a big quilt show and then published in a quilting magazine -- and so it's popping up in a lot of places online.  I love the jumble of color.  And it's an unusual block ... not difficult, just with some piecing of component parts. A very kind quilter named Amy Badskirt posted a tutorial on her blog on making this block, in case you're as smitten as I am.

Speaking of jumbles of color and pattern, I started thinking about the Kaffe Fassett quilts I've been wanting to make.  This (from his Quilt Romance book) would be fun and, I think, would look great with a scrappier, multicolored look.

 

Thinking of that quilt made me get up and go get the book off of my shelf.... and I found that I'd tagged the page with his "Ice Cream" quilt which is just strips of different widths sewn round each other.  (Here's someone else's version of it...)  There's no more than 1 yard of any of the fabrics required so it'd be a good stash quilt.

I fell asleep last night thinking of quilts, but didn't decide anything.  Clearly I just need to pick one and dive in.  But which one?  I'll be letting this percolate while I get some left-brain work done today.  Decisions, decisions.