It took me ten months to finish David’s guitar quilts.

I moaned.  I procrastinated.  I knashed my teeth and wailed.

So guess what I started on this week?

Another quilt 🙂

Yeah, yeah, I know but even if chain piecing will never fill my heart with rainbows and butterflies, I love the look of quilts. That means if I want to enjoy, I have to sew them.

This time, I’m doing a far simpler quilt from the Winter issue of “Simple Quilts and Sewing” called ‘Plaid Stars’.

It’s a nice quilt, with lots of rich colours, but not overly busy or scrappy.  I’m thinking of making this for a friend of ours.  He’s older, and I wanted something classic and masculine but not fuddy-duddy or fussy.

Almost all of the fabrics are from Connecting Threads.  They were a new to me online fabric company and I have to say, I’m very impressed.   The prices are hugely competitive (some of the prices were under $3/yd).  Shipping to Canada was a breeze, too, which is often not the case and more than reasonable.   I placed my order on a Wednesday and by Monday at lunch, my fabrics were on my front porch. The quality of the fabric is very good, too.   I will definitely be ordering from them again.

The sample quilt was done in flannel but frankly, I don’t find much modern flannel holds up.  It pills and fades.  If I’m going to put the time in, I’d rather use a standard quilting cotton.  I have three shades of burgundy-red, three of olive green, a lovely gold print and a creamy white with a small tan print.

I ended up picking up the few fabric colours I couldn’t get from Connecting Threads locally and despite the fact that I was only getting 2 1/2 yds, they cost me almost as much as the rest of the quilt fabrics put together.

Look at the backing fabric!  It’s really ideal for the colours of the quilt and it was a steal at $4 and change/yd.  It really has all the right tones and even echoes the plaid theme that the front has going on.

I’ve already got the quilt cut.  I strip pieced the green strips over the weekend and have started marking the snowballs and half square triangles.  It’s a much faster quilt than David’s guitar quilt, especially since I’m only making one.   We’ll see how it progresses.   I’ve still got lots of spring projects I want to get done, including an adorable embroidered coat I’ve been working on for the past little while. I’ll show you some of my progress pics of that project soon!