Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas....

Don't have any knitting that I can show you right now, so how about another quilt?

A couple of months ago, I bought some fat quarters at Spool. The fabric was designed by Denyse Schmidt, and is a re-issue of a line called Flea Market Fancy. One thing that is fascinating to me, as a knitter looking at the world of quilting, is the different ways that these crafters approach their raw materials. Many knitters seem to get very bent out of shape when a yarn or color of yarn is discontinued. Publishers and yarn companies get all sorts of grumpy letters asking why a particular yarn is discontinued, or complaining that the yarn used in a book or pattern isn't available in every knitting shop in the world. Yarn lines are designed to last for at least a few seasons, if not longer, and lots of attention is paid to creating patterns designed especially for use with a specific yarn. On the other hand, quilting fabric collections (other than solids) are understood to be available only for a limited time. (I think, and I'm sure that my readers in the know will correct me if I am wrong, that most fabric collections have one or two production runs, and then that's it.  They are retired.) If the pattern you're using is more than a few months old, chances are you couldn't find the fabric you're looking for even if you wanted to. Quilters seem much more blase about the fact that they may have to pick out a different collection or set of fabrics, or dip into their stash and leftover bits, when beginning a new project.

I do understand that there are more variables with knitting. For example, there are at least seven different weights or categories of yarn, each of which handles differently and knits to a different size, whereas most quilting shops carry all their collections in a single weight of fabric, quilting cotton (with maybe one or two other weights, like home dec fabric and the vinyl stuff for raincoats).  The fact that knitting takes a lot longer means there's more at stake if you mess up the size of the knitted fabric you're making, and so on.

However, it does seem to me that there is a different mentality between the two crafts, a difference I find fascinating.  The point of this digression (to the extent there is one!) is that the fabric I bought for this quilt happens to be a somewhat unusual thing in the quilting world, a line of fabric that sold out, but was so popular that it was brought back for another run a while after it first appeared.

I found that intriguing, so I decided to buy some of it and play with it, to see what all the fuss was about.

The predominant colors that I chose were a coral-red, gray, a soft aqua blue and brown. I have to say that the colors did work beautifully together, and the fabrics looked good whether they were small prints, nearly solids or big prints.

I was inspired to try Film in the Fridge's tutorial on making scrappy triangles. I'd never done triangles like that before, and I wanted to see what it was like.  I wanted to feature the fabric I'd bought rather than use of lots of scraps, so most of the triangles are made out of a single print; just for fun, I did a handful "scrappy"-style, with multiple prints. I used two shades of white/off-white to set off the triangles, and then I used the leftover browns for binding.

I even went a little nutty and did a set of mini-triangles to put on the back.

I had a lot of fun making this one, and I learned a lot from it too.  Thank you, once again, to my helpful quilt holder, a.k.a. Boy Twin.....