This is prayer quilt for the church group I used to work with. We worked with donated fabrics for 90% of our needs, and in this case a man had lost his wife to cancer and was left to raise their five daughters on their own. I suggested using 5 different pinks in the quilt to represent the five girls. Because the pink at the center of the blocks was rather more red than pink, I put the lace strips over it to “cut it” a bit. It’s an okay quilt given the limitations we were working with, but I feel like I can name 5 things wrong with the color here and they are all shades of pink.

And then my color growth with the Blue Swoon quilt:

It’s… better. I say that with a hesitancy that comes from a place of insecurity about my color skills (and not begging for nice comments, because you guys have already said such nice things about it already - thank you!).

I feel like I need to force myself to do an insanely scrappy quilt just to push all sorts of colors together and make myself get over my aversion to things not matching exactly.  Here is where we pause to listen to my parents, husband, every school teacher I ever had, and anyone who’s ever seen me work on a jigsaw puzzle laugh their fool heads off with the idea that I will ever be a laid back person who can just “let things go”.

I’m very good about setting/accomplishing goals around increasing my technical skills (paper piecing, trapunto, FMQ, etc.). What I need to do is balance that with it growing my “softer skills” like design, color, and art quilting skills in composition.

It’s likely that my nerdy inner-self that craves structure is going to wield a spreadsheet and a protractor and beat down the inner artsy-fartsy hippie. That’s probably why I don’t wear more scarves, too.