Bricks

Today I need to think happy thoughts. I can't dwell on all the tragedy down in the gulf states - it's too overwhelming. I've already watched way too much news coverage. I need the solace of talking about quilts. Happy quilts, nothing to do with the suddenly homeless and comfortless masses.

This is a happy, positive quilt. Actually, I think this is a photo of just the top. D'oh, don't have a better pic. I quilted this, unsurprisingly enough, in black perle cotton fans.

This is "Bricks," named for the shape of the blocks. (I'm not really into naming my quilts - whatever is easiest to remember is usually what sticks, tho sometimes the names change every few years as I forget what I used to call them.)

This is the quilt that my Tonya bruise block fell out of. My name was supposed to be the last brick in the wall, but it just didn't work. Too purple to go there. Plus I would have had to drop out an adjective, and I kinda liked all those.

I didn't put punctuation in the quilt, but I think of it as "Be yourself, be dazzling, be joyful..." but it could also be read "Be yourself: dazzling, joyful..."

These are all words I'd use to describe myself, at least the me I'd like to be. Sure, there are lots of other adjectives that I could have in there, but that was what I needed to hear back then. And I wanted fun, exciting words. Be honest, be sincere, be kind, be good-hearted: all excellent choices, but not what I had in mind for this quilt.

I'd challenged myself to use every letter of the alphabet in this quilt. Then I experimented with making some letters tall and narrow (imaginative) and others wide (bold). I used the black with speckly grey bits and all the rest are commercially available hand-dyes.

So if you've made a bunch of free-pieced letters and don't know what to do with them, here's a project for you. What shall you be?