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Another cold winter day, another floral pattern.

Oh, winter. You are the houseguest who stays too long, sits on the couch all day, and eats all the food. It does not bode well that I'm sick of this season already and it's only January. Nothin' coming around the corner but more of the same. My inbox and catalogs keep telling me to go ahead and buy some new pieces for my spring wardrobe, and I'm like "Wha-huh?" I've been wearing the same pair of skinny jeans for close to 3 months now because they're the only thing that fit under my big boots. Okay, shake it off, Katie! Shake it off. Moving along. 

I've been working on some floral patterns. While I don't consider myself a "flowery" kind of girl (lovely, but no thank you, Laura Ashley), I do really love flowers, and I even love floral patterns. Amy Butler, Anna Maria Horner: beautiful! They make it look so easy! But I've got to say, florals are a challenge for me right now. I don't really have the hang of it yet, so I'm going to continue to work on building up my "floral skills." In the meantime, I've come up with these:

Both patterns will be available in my Spoonflower shop when I get around to ordering my samples. I also decided to try and work them into a tea towel layout (below). I don't know, I think I like them, for a first go and all that. Besides, it's nice to flood my brain with flowers this time of year.

Thinking Spring Quilting

Another week, another Spoonflower contest. I don't participate in all of them - I won't have that kind of time until Ben goes to Kindergarten! But I was interested in this week's contest: spring floral cheater quilt block. Say that five times fast. But it's January. And it was -23º here a few days ago. Who doesn't need some spring right about now? Put your mitten-wearing hands down. And "cheater" sounds like my kind of quilting. I like quilting and I have a real appreciation for the skill involved in being a good quilter. I personally really like modern, simple, clean, updated approaches to quilting. If I'm doing the quilting I really like easy. I don't have the patience or the precision to be a true quilting purist. Hand quilting an enormous quilt is way beyond the scope of my attention span. I've only made about 4 or 5 quilts. None of them have been bigger than crib size and all of them were machine quilted with very simple patterns, but I do love piecing together coordinating fabrics.

Simple patchwork quilts have always caught my eye, even before I gave a second thought to quilting myself. I think the patchwork is quilting in its most basic and beautifully simple form. A gathering of all those scraps of fabric that when left alone don't accomplish much, but when put together make this gorgeous kaleidoscope of color. When I started this design, not really knowing how to create a cheater quilt block, I knew it was going to be patchwork. 

This design features 3 inch squares of 8 different patterns. Using the spring floral theme I thought about spring rains (drops and puddles) and some of my favorite spring arrivals: daffodils, tulips, crabapple blossoms, and pussy willows. There was a restricted color palette for this contest, which was actually fantastic and very easy to work with. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out as this was my first time really creating a "collection" of patterns all based on the same theme and colors. It's very simple in design, but I like the end result. It might even end up as another crib quilt. I think I'll probably cut larger squares of the patchwork and surround them with white borders because I do really like a good deal of white space in a quilt. I'm also uploading a couple of the individual patterns so I can get those on their own for the backing or bias edging.

All that to say, if you'd like to vote for my design, you can head over here. It's called April Showers. There are some really pretty designs in this contest - I have little hope of placing very high, but it was a fun contest all the same. In the meantime I can look at this and forget about the view currently out my window.

Brown paper packages tied up with string

Now that (almost) all of the gifts have been delivered and unwrapped I can give you a peek of the tea towel presents I gave out this year. As I've mentioned before, I love making gifts, so it was really fun to sew up a bunch of my tea towels to give away. Most people opened them and said, "So is this like to use? As a towel?" I get it. It's not a well-loved and well-stained flour sack. We all know what happens to kitchen towels over time. But I also feel that most beautiful things should also be functional, it's kind of a motto of mine. Which is why I love the kitchen towel: pretty, useful, what more do you need? This one even has a calendar on it! I'll admit, I am trying to find a fun way to hang it in my own kitchen, so I can look at it more often than I get around to doing the laundry. But ultimately, I think most people who make gifts for people want, more than anything, that they get used. If you really like it, don't put it away forever in the drawer. Let your baby spit up on the burp cloth, put your toddler to bed under that hand-sewn quilt, and dry your hands on the kitchen towel. Maybe don't mop up grape juice with it, but you get the idea.