Indigo & White (UFO Reveal #4)

I bought these beautiful fat eighths of indigo many years ago at the Vermont Quilt Festival, and set them aside for something special. When I decided to take a class making 40-6" blocks over five months, the indigos called out to me. I paired them with blue and white shirtings to make medium tones, and plain bleached muslin for the backgrounds. The class used Edyta Sitar's "Dear Mom" Quilt Recipe Cards. We had lots of fun in class each month -- two years ago ;)

(Ignore the pink cast to the photos -- the blocks are on top of pink foam insulation board for photography purposes!)

I only paper-pieced one of these blocks -- multiple attempts at traditional piecing couldn't produce a 6" block to save my life! One of my biggest challenges was keeping the directional prints in line... many of the indigos are directional, and at least one of my shirting prints. Many in the class worked with the Wuthering Heights line or CW repros to get the effect of the sample quilt; there were some with brights or random scraps, but mine was the only really crisp two-color plan. It always got lots of compliments -- I think it really shows off the tiny pieces!

Why is this one still blocks? I designed two settings for this quilt, and got stuck choosing!

The first is a simple on-point setting with sashing (takes 41 blocks -- not a problem to make one more). But that's only a 58" square quilt, which is kind of a funny size for me. There's enough indigo for a few more blocks, but not a large number... making this setting bigger would require buying more -- and they're not inexpensive, relatively speaking.

The second setting is definitely the result of too much time playing with EQ, but I absolutely love it. It's an uneven nine patch that's 3x6", and it makes a very cool circular pattern around the blocks. I love it -- I just don't love the idea of piecing 84 of those blocks! That one I can easily get to 71" square, though, which is a better size in general.

So, make the quilt I can reasonably finish, or make the quilt I love? I want to make the one I love... I was going to show you the EQ snapshots, but I can't find the project file -- it seems to have disappeared when I moved to EQ6. I can recreate it (I was able to put the blocks in a user library), but not tonight.

And that, my friends, is the end of UFO box #1...