While Snowed In

I got snowed in at my parent's house for most of last week. Luckily I had these fabrics and my quilt plan stashed there waiting to be cut. I don't have the best luck cutting with the rotary cutter so I needed mom to show me a few tricks.

Once I got going I didn't want to stop! I got all the pieces cut and laid out in one evening.

I played around with the layout for a while and was finally happy with it.

Mom's trick for making sure the values were distributed evenly, a black and white image of the layout:

The next morning I pieced together the first two rows and, with a little adjustment, fit them nicely together.

I came home that day and my house was much colder, so I haven't wanted to sit at my machine. I was wishing for a crochet project because that is something I could have worked on while cozied up under a quilt on the couch.

It was a crazy week around here with highs in the upper 70's last weekend, then ice and snow and the coldest temps in twenty years here. I made it home Thursday and it was not too harrowing. Thursday night into Friday morning we got more snow and schools ended up being closed four days in a row! This weather is definitely atypical for us. Though we were cold, we really came out unscathed. One of our cold water pipes froze up a bit but I caught it in time and thawed it out with my hair dryer. So many people here had frozen pipes, and rolling blackouts throughout Texas was turning off heat, luckily our heat is gas. There were many wrecks and abandoned cars on the roads and I'm happy that I waited to come home and didn't risk my life or my car. I'm glad it has thawed and is warmer now, but I do feel like I accomplished something while I was snowed in.

This quilt was inspired by Wee Wonderful's version of the Plain Spoken Quilt from The Modern Quilt Workshop. Looking at her color scheme again, I'm afraid I put too many colors into mine, it is so hard to restrain myself when it comes to color! I haven't seen the pattern or book in person (though I do want to), but designed mine based on how large I needed the quilt to end up for the back of our couch. My rectangles are cut to 9" tall x 2.5" and 4.5" wide. I had extra fabric so I ended up with 10 rows of 10 small blocks and 9 large blocks each. Surprisingly Frank loves the quilt despite the multitude of color, and that makes me very happy!