Go With What You Know

It's important to listen to the fabrics when they try to tell you what works well together and what doesn't. I've pulled fabrics from my stash for this quilt three different times, grouping and regrouping; which way do I really want to go? If I don't know where I'm going, it's really unlikely I'll get there.

So I went back to my Dating Fabric book and decided - to heck with the current interest in reproducing Civil War quilts. I don't actually LIKE the fabrics or the combinations; so why put myself through this? I decided to move the palette to the Turn of the Last Century, 1890-1910. Now I feel like I know what I'm doing!

I also decided it would be worth while to really lay out each block in Electric Quilt so I could see what it looked like before spending the time piecing! A few hours scanning the actually fabrics I wanted to use and laying out the block in EQ was much less time consuming then weeks of cutting and piecing.

I have one arm of the new third block pieced. I wonder sometimes how women of by-gone eras made such stunning quilts with so few tools. Maybe I just try too hard. I remind myself I do this for fun. ;)