Hmm... to quilt or not to quilt?

I became a bit more of an adult today. I went to target to spend a gift card and bought my very own ironing board and bathroom scale... and I was excited about it.

On another note! I drove super far today to go to one of my favorite places: Jo-Anns fabric and crafts. It's probably too soon after my last quilt to start another but I just couldn't help myself. I am about to get much busier with work, babysitting and thesis writing but I figured I can start my quilt and work on it when I need a break. No threat at all of it becoming procrastination material. Right?

Our couch just looks so sad with no quilt on the back and the only quilt I have in Nashville is a blue one. Considering our couch is brown with orange and red pillows that one probably won't work.

Don't worry. The blue quilt doesn't just get shoved in a closet. I get to curl up with it every morning when I do my bible study.

I had already picked out a quilt that I wanted to make. This is called both a candy jar quilt (supposedly the blocks look like wrapped candy... I don't see it... but that's what I'm told) and an autograph quilt. For an autograph quilt you make all the center bars white and then people can sign their names in each box! Cool concept. Maybe I'll get around to that some day.

Picking the fabric is great when you find the perfect combination but getting there is not easy. For me, choosing fabric almost always requires about an hour of wandering around, picking one fabric, putting it back, getting two others, switching them around, and walking up and down the aisle until I am finally content.

Usually I have to find one fabric that I really like and then go from there. For this quilt I knew I had to do something orangy-red but I couldn't find an orange or red fabric that jumped out at me. So believe it or not, for this quilt my inspiration fabric is the light blue one. It has orange, navy and red cherries (?) so I wasn't WAY far off from my target colors. After I have one fabric it's much easier and the rest just sort of fall in line.

Fun times at Joanne's Fabric

I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of my pillows did have a little tealish blue in it so the blue in my quilt won't be lonely.

The one fabric that I forgot to include in the pictures is the background fabric. (aka the white in the candy jar photo). I really didn't think that doing a white white would look good with these colors. The light color in the orange fabric (which is the backing as well as one of the detail pieces) is an off-white so I was hesitant to pair it with a white white. In the end I branched out and got an off-white background fabric as well.

Now that I have my big girl ironing board and my fabric has taken a trip through the washing machine and the drier I am ready to begin!

P.S. While I will keep writing about the progress of the quilt, I can promise this one is going to take me a while.