A new project

I should be finishing up the bedroom curtains, but I'm at a stage where I need to be careful and not make any idiot mistakes, and this past week or so my free time and focused brainpower have not intersected to create a curtain-appropriate sewing opportunity.

So, instead of FINISHING something, I've started yet another project. Don't know what happened to my clothes-sewing mojo, but inspiration seems to be coming in the form of quilt ideas these days. Above is some early-on string piecing for a lap quilt I'm making entirely from stash fabrics. Yes, there's a lot of pink in the pile: that's a fuschia solid that will be the lattice around many different scrap squares.

Here's where I got the inspiration: Kaffe Fassett's "Taupe Lattice" from his Glorious Patchwork book. The book's on loan from the library and has to go back soon, so I snapped this pick as a reference.


The quilt in the book is quite large, and mine will be significantly smaller, so I'm not planning to do the wide border shown here -- although I love it, and do think it makes the quilt. But it's at least 8" wide each side, which for the size I'm making would leave very little of the middle and probably the proportions would look all off, so I'm going to come up with something a bit narrower. Probably. I'll deal with border decisions when the center is done (at which point this book will be long gone, hence the need to have this photo on my hard drive).

I'm eager to see how this looks with a hot pink lattice compared to the neutral taupe KF used. I like the variety of lattice intersection colors he used (the smallest pieces), but am going with a very narrow range of flame oranges for mine.

This is not a priority project, and I have the usual zillion other things I should be doing, so there's a good chance it will go into a bin at some point before I finish it, for a nice long rest while I tackle more important things. In the meantime, cutting basic squares and strips and string piecing are the kind of thing I can do when I need a break from the computer and want to do a little sewing without tackling any kind of project that needs brainpower.