trusting your instincts

I have these wonderful friends who I am attempting to make the fastest quilt for. It may or may not be done in time for Christmas, we shall see. Standing in the way of completion are 4 graduate classes and starting from almost scratch.

 I have 12 or 16 of these units made, and enough fabric to make a few more. They clock in at about 10". I was going to make the cover project, Red Hots from the February 2012 issue of Better Homes and Gardens American Patchwork and Quilting. 

But I hate making Flying Geese. I can't explain it, I just find it to be a superb pain, so I made these squares instead and I started fussing with a layout that would net me a quilt of some kind of size for an adult that didn't look totally girly. 

There's nothing wrong with either one of these. [Yes, they are different!]  It's just. Blah. 

So I did something I've never done before: I ordered fabric online. I was hesitant because, while screen resolution has come a long way, I wasn't sure how true the color was going to be once I had it in my hands. As it turned out, I was slightly right. The reds were a little more red than I expected. I was hoping for  something more burgundy, but they belong to the same colorway, so all is not completely lost. Once I got the fabric out of the envelope, I found myself floundering again. I really hadn't been thinking properly, had I, when I ordered a butter yellow, a fat quarter of blood red and this watercolor of a summer-y marshey something.

I bundled up the bits and fabric, along with the quilts that live at my apartment to the Backroom. After some show and tell, I pulled the project out and said "Am I off on this one?" and the consensus was that if I cut out the yellow and the red, then yes, I was going to be off. All this based on the four quilts I had brought with me. They have cohesion with themselves and each other, something I hadn't realized, and this project is further evidence of that developed style. Apparently I am a 60 year old woman in a 27 year old's body.

I'm going to go with it.  

I'm still not sure about sashing, whether or not I'll go around with yellow, and then green, or green then a bit of yellow and then more green. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see what I've got after this is all done being cut. There's only three yards of the Reflections green. Maybe I'll throw in some of the half triangle units and do a sawtooth something. I think it'll look great when it's all finished.