I’ve been seriously quilting for 28 years now, almost 29. I’ve learned a lot about quilting and I’ve learned a lot about myself during this time and one of the most important things I’ve learned is that I am constantly changing and evolving. When I first started, my tastes focused on reproduction fabrics. The brightest thing in my stash was some 30’s fabric, otherwise, it was all about dark and dreary. Those fabrics still hold a place in my heart, they are warm and inviting to me, the visual embodiment of wrapping myself in a quilt and snuggling down in that warmth. The last five years, there has been a growing love of bright fabrics, especially fabrics from the Kaffe Fassett collective. Oh my lamb chops, the bright quilty goodness there! Those fabrics are like having the sun suddenly come out on a rainy day and just brighten up the whole world. They take warm and inviting to a whole new place!

At the same time, I’ve noticed that what I used to call scrappy has also been evolving to a new level. I’ve enjoyed following Bonnie Hunter for a while now, and she has a very scrappy eclectic style. She works from an impressive stash that has been a lot of years in the making, and as such, not all the fabrics are the most recent, stylish fabrics. What she does with a riot of color and print is, to my eye, downright amazing. There is a practical side to this style too – if you are short a bit of fabric for a quilt, adding to a very scrappy quilt is much easier than adding to a two color/two fabric quilt. Pretty much anything will go to get you over the finish line.

There’s one more change in my quilting life, that has been coming along the last several years and that’s the intricacy of the piecing. I used to want to focus on quilts that I could piece in a weekend. It was fun and easy and I got the satisfaction of finishing a quilt top very fast. Over time, however, this process takes a LOT of fabric over a year and results in a lot of unquilted tops. As I get closer to retirement, I joke that I need to make my fabric dollars stretch for as much entertainment I can get out of them. For this reason, I have been making much more intricate blocks with smaller pieces that take a lot more time to finish. I sew 10 times longer to finish a quilt top, but that just fine. I have always enjoyed the process a lot more than the finished product (the giant stack of UFOs is a testament to the fact that I’m a process person, not a product person).

I am finding there is a synergy between my enjoyment of very scrappy quilts and this enjoyment of the intricate piecing. I can put all of my stash into a project and since the pieces are cut very small, everything plays nicely. It becomes more about the contrast of light and dark than about the specific color used. One of my favorite projects right now is a quilt made up of 6″ pineapple blocks that have 10 rounds in each block. Tiny pieces, lots of contrast and everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. I need to find a fabric with sinks on it just so that I can say I included the kitchen sink… but I digress.

So I’m changing and I’m growing, I’m expanding my horizons to include things that I never would have looked at or attempted 10 years ago. I wonder where I will be 10 years from now – I know the possibilities are almost endless!