Formerly known as...

I admit defeat. My first quilting defeat, that is. I was really excited about my Triple Irish Chain wedding quilt for two close friends that are getting married this summer. And then I started laying out my fabric and it all crashed down on me. :o(   I believe that I DID pick out nice colors which I believe are close to their wedding colors/favorite colors.

But the truth is I DIDN'T pick the correct shades (tones?) of said colors for Irish Chain layouts. I wanted to do scrappy but keep the colors in the same place i.e. yellow always in the center followed by green then blue. But there's not real darker color than the rest so it all just jumbles together and does not look like I wanted it to.

 First try: yellows in the center.

Second try: blues in the center.

Of course I realized this AFTER cutting all my fabric into 2 1/2" strips. What to do? I thought maybe there was enough difference between the yellow and green to scale it down to a Double Irish Chain. No go. :o(

My scraps are just too different and at the same time, not different enough. Who does that?! Maybe I psyched myself out by not being able to see it all in the grand scheme of things. I know that I didn't like a single block, though, and that was enough for me. I thought about doing a rail fence with all 3 colors blending into each other, but again the colors are not conducive to that layout.

So after over thinking it all twice and out loud to my very patient husband, I decided to go for a rail fence stair step type of quilt inspired by Red Pepper Quilts. I'm going to make mine bigger with 3 strips of color and a wider white so I believe it will be a 10.5" square.

I am so over the hill with this layout now! Well, as long as I don't start over thinking things again. I sure hope not because I started piecing my strips yesterday. I'd like to do a thin white border followed by a scrappy 2 1/2" square border, probably doing a blue, yellow, green pattern again. So I've renamed the quilt (for now) as the D&B quilt. It's way shorter than "Triple Irish Chain Quilt". :o)

In other news, I managed to piece two Swoon blocks this week. It felt awesome to get back into it. I may try to piece the rest two at a time as well, just so that it doesn't take me all year to finish it. I'm not too thrilled about the over all colors. I probably should have focused more on the colors of the whole quilt rather than the theme. Oh well. It's just going on my bed. Nobody will ever know. Unless they read this blog. OR look at my flickr photostream. :o)