Day 340: For some reason, I'm on a quilting jag. I have one row to go on a fully machine-made Cathedral Window before I can start setting cats in the "windows," so in the interest of keeping the spirit alive, I made a sample Dresden Plate block using blue scraps. I was so pleased with the way it turned out that I decided the time had arrived: at long last, I'd sew the orange quilt I've been threatening to make since the 1970s.
Now it has to be said that when I start assembling quilt blocks, I find it much more difficult to keep the placement of the pieces random than setting them in order. Ironically, it is that very randomness that I find most appealing in quilts. I spent a lot of time sick when I was a kid, usually nursing a sore throat and a fever beneath the Double Wedding Ring quilt my great-grandmother made as a wedding gift for my mom and dad. She'd pieced it from cotton flour sacks. I would amuse myself by "walking" the Double Wedding Ring path with my fingers, attempting to find two or more pieces of the same print. Most of the time, it was easy, but there were one or two prints which had only been used for a single wedge. Those were my treasures, those singletons, and by the time I'd recovered from one malaise only to come down with another, I'd have forgotten exactly which ones they were, and the process of finding them could start all over again.
While there won't be any singles in my "Sunflower Season" Dresden Plate quilt, I am still striving for randomness. It's easy to build an ordered universe, not quite so simple to create a chaotic one.
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