Time to play

Sometimes, I get a little too serious about my hobby. I feel the need to be too "creative" and feel like I need to reinvent the whole quilting wheel. Other times, I get stressed out because there are so many things I want to do and so little time.

One thing I've wanted to do for a while is make a quilt with these polka dots and Japaneese prints. I've been storing them in this vintage suitcase I found a while ago at a garage sale. They were supposed to be a baby quilt that looked like a comic strip, but that didn't happen. Then I felt the need to do something "special" and improvisational with them. The thing about little picture quilts is that they take a lot of thought and concentration, and I don't have a lot of creative time and space without little ones talking in my ear or climbing under foot.

So I've decided to give myself a break and so quilts with regular "blocks". After all, the thing that attracted me to quilting was that I could cut the fabric when the kids were asleep, and then sew them together without much thought when the kids were awake. Sometimes I forget this, or think it doesn't have as much creative "value" somehow as my more improvisational quilts.

I've been wanting to make some of these "quilt as you go" blocks for a while now, so I thought that rather than committing to a whole big quilt of them, I would just do 9 and make a little quilt for the kids. Fun. Simple. Freeing.