This, the beginning of the Capriccioso quilt from Millefiori Quilts 3 that I now think of as the Candy Cane quilt, was one of the projects I looked at and was ambivalent about. Until, that is, I mentioned it to a friend and showed her this picture. She persuaded me that I didn’t want to toss this one.
Particularly since all the little stars for it are done and nestled in this box.
And all the pieces for what I think of as the bow-tie unit are all ready to sew.
So I decided to sew one of the bow-tie units together, to see how much continuous stitching I could find (which, of course, makes this way more interesting to me to hand piece) and found I quite liked it. So the Candy Cane quilt is one of the projects that I will be working on at some point in the future.
I have always been drawn to 5-point stars and when an Inklingo collection for 4″ 5-point stars was released, I was thrilled.
First I had to make one in my favourite shabby chic sort of fabric. I have plans to make a few (as if I could stop at a few!) shabby chic blocks and turn this into a pretty little quilt (famous last words).
I had a lot of fair-sized scraps of batiks and Kaffe Fassett fabrics left over from making masks. I had always wondered how well KF fabrics would work in small blocks so I decided to test a few out with these wonderful little 5-point stars.
I’ve printed just enough of the batiks and KF fabrics to make a wall-hanging. Initially I was thinking of this as the Covid quilt but I don’t think I want to name it that! All the fabrics used in it, though, will be from scraps from making masks – perhaps the mask quilt?
This box is a multi-project box, containing the pieces for the KF/batik 5-point stars, a few more of the shabby chic 5-point stars and the project that’s the reason behind the title of this blog post although the shabby chic stars are likely also a candidate. But for now what is that project?
It’s the 3″ Winding Ways blocks done in French General fabrics. I had initially printed just enough for a wall hanging and have pieced about a dozen of them so far. But as I was piecing this one I kept thinking about what fun it would be to make a lap quilt of the 3″ blocks. I have trouble wrapping my mind around how many 3″ blocks I’ll need, but as piecing these little gems is such fun, i suppose it’s not that big a stretch. I am, after all, the person with all the pieces pirnted and ready to sew elebenty billion sunflowers! Well, okay – just under 175 more sunflowers.
So for now I’m going to try to decide what I want to do but until I have decided I’m not piecing any more of them. If I am going to go for a lap-size quilt, then I want to get all the printing and cutting out done so that the project is all ready in its entirety (and so I can gaze at it and wonder if I lost my mind!)
Baxter just watches as I play with fabric pieces and waits his turn to maybe grab one or two.
