And for my next trick . . .

I've got two project to work on - one old and one new. The new one is a little bit secret, although I don't think my friend reads my blog (if you do, hide your eyes, Emily!). This is the stack of fabric that is going to become a quilt for her little baby girl, due next month. I asked her what colours she was feeling for this baby and she said peach and yellow. My initial thought was to use my Freshcut stash, but it also includes a lot of this green that I really like but she's not fond of. So, I reached deep into my stash and picked up a few bits and bobs online, and here's the fabric stack I came up with:

I think it will make a sweet little vintage-y quilt which will be just Emily's style. My fingers are crossed, in any case.

The other thing I'm working on is the quilt formerly known as the Toast and Tea Quilt, which I started back in 2010. I had this fantastically complicated idea of having blocks looking like dancing toast, wonky tea cups, lines or words from "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" and who knows what else. But then I realized that I will never have enough time to make the quilt in my head until I'm about 50. And by then I'll have a new idea. And really, I do like these blocks just by themselves. I like the interplay of the two different dot fabrics in each block, along with the various random background fabrics.

So I put the blocks up on my design wall and had a stare at them. I made enough half-square triangles to make 14 blocks, thinking I would be interspersing them with other things. I took two out that I don't think actually go with the others, and decided to add 8 new blocks, to bring the total up to 20.

When I looked at the blocks, I thought they sort of looked like Popsicle colours, but my favorite flavor - lime - was missing, as was blue, like the rocket blue-red-white popsicles you could only get fromt he ice cream bike when I was a kid. Yes, in  Thunder Bay there was an ice cream bike, usually driven by an opportunistic teenager in search of an easy summer job (though how pedaling a bike with a full metal freezer attached to it in a city built into a hill could be considered easy is beyond me).

 Its funny, because I hardly ever let my kids eat the glucose and food coloured laden popsicles, even though I used to scrounge for change around the house so I could walk up to the corner store and buy them. But then, you can no longer send in 100 popsicle sticks to win a free frisbee from the POPSICLE club, now can you?

But I digress! So, the newly dubbed Popsicle quilt is now under way! I picked a few new neutral fabrics to add to the ones I already had - including a few precious squares of my favorite Japanese teacup print as a nod to the original quilt - and I'm on my way! Its amazing how actually having a do-able plan makes a quilt go faster.

If it keeps snowing (snow in April - I know), I might get this quilt top done pretty fast. Or maybe I'll finish the peach one first . . . I love decisions like that. So much easier than deciding how much DS time is appropriate for an 8 year old.