Permission to Play

Most of the quilting I've done has always been purpose-driven. It's either a gift for someone or yet another quilt for my own house, so I pick a pattern, buy fabric, and make the quilt, following the pattern. I've made a couple quilts without patterns, sort of making up the design as I go, but they were still made for a purpose.

Recently I've decided to spend some time just playing for the fun of it. I'm using fabrics from my stash and experimenting with some different types of blocks. Sure, I'd like to use the blocks to make a quilt rather than adding them to my UFO list, but there's no set purpose (and more importantly) no hard and fast timeline for finishing.

Last week my husband was working late, the kids were in bed, and I had some time. I pulled out my batik scraps (my favorites...I could write a whole blog entry about batiks, but I'll save that for another day), some Kona white, and started playing. I knew I wanted to try some wonky blocks. After reading through some quilting blogs, I found this from the Quilt Dad. Perfect!

I sorted my batiks to pull out "my" colors (delicious blues and turquoises and lime greens!) to go with the white solid:

It needed something, though, so I grabbed these to add a "pop" to the center of each block:

And six blocks into my playtime, here's what it looks like:

I love how they turned out, and it's so much fun--just freeform and liberating to grab strips and sew. My left-brained self decided to time how long it took for each block: 20 minutes. I'm planning to sash 3 sides in white and the last side in the orange again and then lay them out, but first I want to make some more blocks. Here are close-ups of all 6 blocks: