I’ve mentioned working on gifts recently, and how secrecy left me with less to talk about here.  I may not have mentioned how terribly impatient I am.  Once I finish making a gift, I mentally hop on one leg until I deliver it.  I often want to call the recipient and ruin the surprise before I even get halfway through a gift project.  And when I’m making something that feels particularly successful, it gets even harder.  On some level, it feels as if I owe a dear friend money, or am keeping a secret I really, really shouldn’t.

I’ve been chewing my knuckles for more than a month over this, now delivered, gift.  Those vibrant triangles I showed you a while back were part of this, a baby quilt I made for my friends Mike and Tara and their adorable newborn son Will.  Scott and Mike grew up together, and Tara and I have been friends since we were teenagers, so it feels particularly special to help welcome their first child into our community.

He was born a couple of weeks ago, but we just got the chance to meet him and deliver the present this weekend.  It felt auspicious to deliver the quilt to them on the weekend of Imbolc, a holiday so tied to creativity, pregnancy, milk, change, music, and warmth.

As I mentioned in that earlier post, I used batiks, and I made the flying geese blocks using a cool one-seam method that makes dimensional blocks.  Since this is for a baby, I did decide to quilt down the free edges of the blocks.  It just seems like that will allow the quilt to last longer and will make it easier to keep clean.  I had visions of those little pockets catching fingers or crumbs.

I’m obviously not in the “pale things for babies” camp.  I loved working with such saturated colors, and I tried to be very generous with my batik stash.

In other news, I think I’ve decided to quilt my string  squares one at a time and then put them together after the fact.  It feels like it will make the whole project much easier to finish.  I even pulled out a sacrificial (i.e. ugly) block to make into a mini-quilt for the cats to lay on so I could play with a quilting design and see if the finished quilt will handle the cats’ abuses.

And now I’m off to try to finish a quilt and make a few dozen garments and bags and maybe weave half a dozen belts and also finish some knitting.  It’s that time of year, and I can sure feel it coming.

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