Chores and "Checkers"

In order to avoid the unwelcome "downer" during the holidays, I've been cleaning and painting closets. sorting and organizing, and throwing out! Oh yeah - who notices closets? I do!!! Don't you love to walk by your clean, organized closet and fling open the doors to be sure all is still neat and tidy? THAT makes ME happy!

I've shown this quilt (above) previously, named "Checkers", and I definitely liked the clean lines of this scrappy pattern - simply pinwheels, and 4-patches. How easy can this get? To achieve that graphic effect, the rows of pinwheels alternate directions, and the 4-patches also alternate light in one upper left corner, and then dark in the left upper corner - very important. You must get them in the right place, although I DO wonder what would happen if I changed it? OK, next quilt!

I had a lot of kids prints and wanted the same effect. Now, you'll notice (below), some of the graphic effect is lost, due to the variety of prints. Uh ohhh ... well I still like it, but it was another excellent lesson to learn. Many of the prints had black in them so I used a small black/white check in the 4-patches. And it WAS pretty 'blah' before I added that border - the last border contains a lot of black/white stripe(bees). The thin black border definitely jazzed it up! And now that I'm looking at the photo, it doesn't look 'blah' at all!

Incidently, there were a LOT of 'possible' pinwheels, that didn't work. I spread them evenly all over the quilt, but they didn't work at all -- too distracting. There are MORE unused pinwheels on my sewing table, than what I used! LOL. Some are big prints cut up that don't show their cuteness, some go the wrong direction, some look terrible with a white background, etc. Hey, ya gotta kiss some frogs before you find that prince! (I now have a LOT of pinwheels to use for labels! - LOL )

This will be a Linus Quilt, and I'll be working on the quilting over the holidays.