Year End Quilt Beginning!

I recognize many quiltmakers begin a new quilt, or two, or more, during the week between Christmas and New Years.  Over the years [decades] that has frequently been my plan, although just as frequently, it hasn't happened. For many years the issue was the need to travel miles and miles from shop to shop trying, often in vain, to find the right fabric for the quilt I was envisioning.  The facts that there is now a lovely little quilt shop just seven miles from my home and that online quilt shops are abundant, eliminate the travel requirement.  Furthermore, this year I had fabrics I've been longing to put to use.

 These lovely Bread 'n' Butter from American Jane (Sandy Klop) for Moda have been playing with my imagination and waiting patiently since sometime last spring or summer.

 I sewed them into strip sets of four because I decided I really could create checkered Dresden Plate blocks as shown on Lurline's 2009 blog post and last fall on Jenny Doan's Missouri Star tutorial.

These are not colors I usually use--but they have been playing around in my brain for several years--at least since I made Mrs. Lebo's Kitchen I and II around 2009. I also blogged about it here. When I saw this Bread'n'Butter collection, I knew the time for returning to these colors was approaching.

So while the College Girl was ailing with some virus she probably caught during her frenzy of pre-Christmas socializing and shoping, and, therefore, was sleeping, I began cutting wedges.

 Here are a couple views of the first block.

 It's very happy, and I love it.  I'm calling this quilt Mrs. Lebo's Legacy since it's a return to the colors I remember from her kitchen as well as the kitchens of many other residents of Woodford and McLean Counties in Illinois in the decade following WWII.  Mrs. Esther Lebo was my first grade teacher, and her real legacy was that throughout the decades of her teaching career she taught hundreds of children to read , and many of us have shared our love of reading and books with thousands of additional children.

I'll post more progress, and bits of what I learn as I go along.

Wishing everyone plenty of joy in quilting, knitting, etc. as we say goodbye to 2016...