Celebrate Colour!

Ok, I know that for people who read my blog regularly this is a bit redundant, so my apologies, but I really wanted to enter my Tic Tac Toe quilt in the Celebrate Color contest that Rachel at Stitched in Color is hosting, and one of the rules is that I can’t link to an old post.  So here it is again!

I must admit that this project felt more like a chore than a pleasure when I first started it.  The charm pack that I was given for the Robert Kaufman MQG Challenge was the Dusty Palette and it just didn’t speak to me.  But it was supposed to be a challenge, so I pushed ahead in that spirit, determined to at least finish the project.  (You can see more of my process photos here and here.)

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to “finished.”  I started to love the colours!  The muted tones which had originally felt like a liability started to be the best thing about them.  They blended and faded into each other, allowing for a sort of movement in the piece that I could not have achieved had I been working with brighter, crisper, clearer colours.

Perhaps part of the original problem was that I started this quilt in the spring, when the colours of nature are bright and young, and this just felt out of step with all that.  But by the time I was sewing on the binding autumn had arrived, and suddenly this quilt felt right.  The colours are more like those found in the woods on an autumn walk, when the leaves on the trees have turned to deep, saturated reds and yellow and oranges, when the sky is a smoky blue which hints at rain, and the ground is covered in the fading foliage and flowers of the summer past.

So there you have it!  I hope you enjoyed stopping by here, and reading about my entry.  Be sure to check out all the other fabulous entries in the Home Decor pool, since there are some gorgeous projects to oogle!


And finally, since you’re here anyway, I thought I’d share a hot tip.

If you love lemon and you love homemade cookies (both are a resounding YES! in my case), then you have to make these cookies.  I knew when I first saw the Lemon Crinkle Cookies (from Lauren’s Latest) on Pinterest that I would have to give them a try, and they didn’t disappoint.  I made them just as the recipe says, and since I like my cookies soft and chewy rather than crunchy I baked them for 9 minutes on a non-stick pan.  I took them to book club last Friday and they were a huge hit.  Oh, and they were really fast and easy to make, too.

Actually…maybe I should make myself another batch right now…