I spent a good part of our storm time quilting. I thought I'd just get started and stop when we lost power. But we never did, and so I kept quilting, diving into Ezra's quilt. You might remember I finished Calvin's, made from his baby clothes, a few months ago. I have the fabric for everyone's quilts cut up into piles of 4 inch squares, at the ready. I think I'll end up adding more to Harper and Annabel's, but I feel like the older three kids quilt piles are really 'done' and ready for what comes next. I realized, as I got started with the top piecing, that I'm going to have to get creative with the way I use those four inch squares. While it would be fine for them to all have a similar looking patchwork quilt, I have a feeling I'm going to be incredibly bored making essentially the same quilt over and over. Since I had already started putting Ezra's into strips before this realization, I decided to just add a piece of sold fabric between the rows, and put it a bit on the diagonal. For Adelaide's, I'm considering making triangles out of those squares and coming up with some blocks. I've got time before I need to sort out the last two.
Once again, I am loving this sentimental, memory-lane process of this kind of quilting - the memories that come flooding back as I see each piece of fabric, the thought of them growing as they are. I was showing Ezra the state of his and remarked on the presence of so much plaid. "Yeah, Mom....I'm a plaid kinda guy, don't you know?". Well, I guess I did, but now I really do. While some pieces everyone certainly shares (the slings I cut up, the clothing that got passed from one down to another), I'm really excited to see how differently these quilts end up looking from one another. Just like my kids themselves, - from the same place, with the same materials, and yet as unique and different and individual as they can be. Oh, this is so much fun....
