A Bluestocking Knits

I’ve had the dickens of a time the past couple of months, choosing fabrics for my “Lucy Diamond” quilt. One of my difficulties as a relatively-new quilter is, well, let’s call it fabric insecurity, that feeling that you’re not really as sure as everyone else seems to be that a certain fabric is going to go well with other certain fabrics. I fell in love with “Lucy” because of its cheerfulness, really, the bright, modern colors — despite the fact that my usual modus operandi is rather subdued reproduction fabrics, and so most of what I have in my stash didn’t seem to go with “what I had pictured in my mind,” i.e. the Treehouse original. I confess that I found myself wondering sometimes if I could really “do” cheerful!

So the past few months, as I say, I’ve been buying fat quarters and fat eighths and remnants here and there, and scrabbling through my stash for the odd bright fabric, even through the “rag bin” of worn-out shirts and blouses, and carefully cutting out diamond-shaped pieces of freezer paper templates to sew up the big diamond blocks. I’m actually very pleased with some of them, moderately pleased with others, hate none of them — and so on the whole, I think I’ve done fairly well (!). I showed the first one (very pleased) a few posts ago, and this is the last of the thirty-two full diamond blocks (ex-dress shirt of David’s across the middle) —

(moderately pleased).

After that — well, during the selecting and sewing-up thereof a few blocks ago, for I knew it was approaching, as it were — I had to choose fabrics for the border diamonds. Treehouse’s original has, with the grey that is also the sashing between the big diamonds, a plain check/gingham in navy and white, a low-volume, and a small floral on white that is fussy cut —

I’m pretty sure that if you are not looking specifically for a small floral on white to fussy-cut, they will be everywhere, but could I find one when I wanted one?! The navy-and-white gingham was a bit easier, but when I saw a sort of “plaid” by Camille Roskelley (from her Blueprints collection), I thought “ooh!” and that was that. The low-volume fabric also did not take long, especially when I serendipitously came across a Dear Stella fabric with little books on it — I put that in my Etsy cart fast, I can tell you — and then after some agonizing hours trawling through florals on the Hancock’s of Paducah website, I chose “Peony Blossoms” by Lakeside Art Studio, which is much larger than Treehouse’s choice, and not quite as handsome as my first choice, which has much richer and darker colors, and is thus even less “what I had pictured in my mind” than the Peony Blossoms, but was just too big scale-wise. Never mind, these will do quite nicely.

But then when I opened up the package from the Etsy seller, what I’d received instead of little books fabric was in fact little pretzels. And thus the title of this post, that old saying in quilting circles, “When life gives you pretzels, make quilt blocks.”

Thus, a prompt-and-apologetic fix from the Etsy seller later, the next-to-last and last big-diamond blocks are done and I am ready to collect a quick yard of a Kona or Bella solid in grey and start sewing up these border blocks!