(Not in that order, of course.)

I am making a quilt for my dear friend Kelly B. to celebrate a milestone event, so over Labor Day weekend we went shopping for fabrics and had dinner and cocktails afterward.

We looked at a bunch of designs, and the zig-zag was her favorite–which pleased me, because after making a zig-zag quilt for Ailbhe and Christian’s baby I really wanted to make a larger one. This zig-zag quilt is really inspiring, and I’m going to do the colorful strips on the backing too. Kelly’s also won’t have those horizontal white panels between zig-zags like the baby quilt does. She picked out bright greens, fuschias, teals and purples, which is going to be a really stunning combination I think.

This is going to sound totally geeky, but I love doing simple math in creative projects–it’s really satisfying somehow. Like so: each finished square is 4″ (4 7/8″ with seam allowance); so for a quilt measuring 88″ x 104″, there’ll be twenty-two columns and twenty-six rows. Twenty-six rows means thirteen zig-zags, so there’ll be three zig-zags of three colors and four of the fourth. I need to cut 66 fuschia, 66 green, 66 teal, 88 purple, and 286 white squares…etc., etc.

I may post progress photos over the next several months, but only tiny teaser photos so she’ll still be somewhat surprised when the thing is finished!