From A - Donuts Quilt

Back in the early part of this year, things were really really busy. I had virtually no sewing time and needed to find other (less time consuming) outlets for my crafty inclinations. I started pulling fabric stacks for quilts I would never get around to making as a stopgap until things eased up.

Surprisingly, the act of planning the quilt was enough and by never aiming to actually make the planned quilt, I avoided the stress of overloading my to-do list. A few of the stacks got posted to Instagram but that's really where things ended off.

Now that I have a little more time, I keep thinking about actually making some of these "planned quilts" and have finally started doing just that.

The first stack I grabbed started from one of my favourite prints in Liberty of London's Bloomsbury Gardens collection, Lytton in Magenta.

The mix of magenta, chartreuse, teal and navy in a varied bouquet of flowers just makes my heart sing but when I started pulling fabrics for my quilt, I ended up substituting the magentas in the original print for corals. The final stack of prints is reminiscent of the original print but definitely stands on its own.

A couple of weekends ago, I got to cutting out my fabrics and perfecting my Donuts Quilt layout.

 

The quilt top got finished last weekend and I sent it off to be quilted earlier this week. I'm hoping to share the finished quilt soon!

Linking up to WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced.

From A - Plotting and Planning

I have been making a concerted effort to finish old projects and use up some stash since last Fall. Frankly, it has been going pretty well until just recently when I began spending most of my evenings filling the pages of my trusty quilt idea book with various doodles and measurements.

The two ideas that I keep coming back to are a Gypsy Wife quilt (still can't decide on colours for this one) and my obsession with making a peach and mint quilt.

Unable to resist any longer, I dug through my stash and came up with this lot.

It's not exactly a "pure" peach mint combo but close enough without completely abandoning my natural inclination towards tone and colour variation.

Not wanting to make something that was too involved so that I would be able to start working on a Gypsy Wife without feeling too overwhelmed, I opted for Johanna Masko's Donuts pattern. It's been on my list since seeing Amanda's version last year.

Although I love the pattern, I wanted something a little bigger for super cosy couch snuggling and I wanted to be able to add some more symmetry to the pattern with a four-sided border and another row of donuts. I spent some time with TouchDraw last weekend and ended up with a rough mock-up.

I'm pretty excited about this quilt and am hoping to get my fabrics washed this week so I can start playing with layout and start cutting.

How do you plan projects? Are there any colour schemes that are making you weak at the knees?