The Beginnings of a Quilt

I've had an idea for a quilt I want to make for some time, in fact it's been percolating on the back burner for months. When I found some rather beautiful shot cottons at the New Zealand Quilt Symposium's merchant mall, I decided that the time has come to try it out. But it's always so much easier to imagine what I might make than to actually make it. (Possibilites and visions are cheap - doing the work takes guts and determination!) So I'm combing the bright solid cottons with greys in all values - greys are currently my favourite backdrop for brights - and started by making several bright blocks which included light-colored greys and then adding other blocks which shade all the way to medium and then dark grey. I'm making the blocks in columns, which will be joined so that there's a flow between them (I hope), which will ultimately be strengthened by the quilting lines. Being in the thick of this whole process has reminded me again that making original work is about risk-taking, about taking a concept and fleshing it out in fabric. And all the time, there are no guarantees that it's going to work. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. But like anything worthwhile, it's only by trying and with practice that it improves. And sometimes the reality is what you had in mind, and sometimes it takes on a life of its own and is even more successful than you'd imagined, and sometimes it's a complete flop. But there's nothing I'd rather be doing - this interacting with fabric, cutting a sewing and pressing, listening to what it wants to add next and deciding yes or no. It might be sometime before I can get back to this again, as we'll be on the move for the next three weeks, but I had promised to share some of my "works in progress", and this is one of them. How about you? What are you busy creating?