I particularly love this batik fabric, but I used a favorite speckled fabric for the bars, and a bit of yellow. There are not many yellows in my stash, but I mean for this to be a blue and yellow quilt.

An email this morning showed me a knitting pattern I liked. I never knit from patterns, but I often use patterns to push myself in a new direction. This one has a fancy design on both the body and sleeves. What I found interesting was the raglan sleeve shaping and that it is knit top-down. That is something I never do. I bought the pattern and discovered it has short rows, something else I have never done before. Two new skills!

I am up for that because I recently learned to do a twisted rib and I am eager to incorporate that into a sweater. I have the yarn and it’s green. But I also have yarn for a Koigu and kid mohair-and-silk sweater in smokey violets. The gauge for the purples is close enough to the gauge of the new pattern, so I watched a YouTube video about German Short Rows linked in the pattern. Very easy, very smooth, and the woman said, when it got a little counterintuitive, “Trust in the lord and keep knitting.” I am not religious, but the sentiment delights me.

Trust the process.

The quilt is coming along. I generally prefer to piece square blocks, but this time I am working in random-length rectangles. It may not sound like much of a challenge, but the shapes are pushing me outside my comfort zone. At least two blocks a day should see me done by the end of August, front and back too perhaps.

Here are the first few blocks laid out in stripes. I have begun cutting and piecing, eight blocks so far. Laying out the pieced blocks on the floor tells me how far I have to go and how different combinations of hue and value work. These blocks are not sewn together and they will be moved around as I work. I mean to alternate wider and mostly solid dark stripes with narrower and mostly pieced stripes. Some fabrics are so charming in their pattern I will include them as whole blocks rather than piecing.

I should name the pattern I am piecing—in fact, it probably has a name, but I have never seen it before. It is an embellishment of Chinese Coin, a traditional quilting pattern of multi-colored horizontally-striped vertical bars alternating with solid vertical bars. But really it is a pieced version of a pattern I wove into the center of a weft-faced rug that was itself based on a Colonial American doubleweave coverlet pattern called Snowball and Pinetree. I enjoy reinterpreting traditional textile embellishment from other sources—weaver’s log cabin used in a quilt, knitting a quilting pattern of equilateral triangles, a common fabric piecing design. (I should have kept that sweater purely for the pattern. My family found it ridiculous, however, so off it went to a charity.)

The pieced blocks will have skinny vertical lines crossed on the horizontal such as the yellow on blue in the photo. There is also a wide blue-on-blue block between the two yellow ones in the photo. Some of the center bars in the pieced blocks have a spot of another color—the yellow tip of a speckled blue bar upper right (part of the block shown half-finished in the photo above) and a bit of yellow in the dark blue bar of the block just south of that one. I will use about fifty fabrics in this quilt, all from my stash. The backing too, I hope to piece from my stash. Even the thread I am using is leftovers. Black so far, and on my second bobbin.