Another year...

...another year older. Thirty-four! Eeep! But I received some wonderful well-wishes and some amazing gifts. Yay! I also got a chance to work on the fat quarter quilt and have completed the top:


I'm calling it "Fairy Flight."

In the pattern, the blocks are actually is laid out 4 x 8. But there was a sample in the book that showed a quilt laid out 5 x 7, and I liked the size of it a little better. It just seemed more pleasingly proportioned to me. So I carefully cut my fat quarters and was able to squeeze out 35 blocks, allowing me to do the larger layout. The downside is that the symmetry is lost. But I like the overall proportion better, so I think it's a fair trade-off.

Next up: marking and basting. I've decided I'm going to practice my quilting on this one by doing some patterns. This quilt seems like a good opportunity because the prints are so busy that if the quilting sucks, no one will really notice! :P I'm planning on doing a design in the open center areas (between the chains) where the blocks join together as well as some border quilting. We'll just have to see how the plan actually unfolds.