It was a pretty busy weekend in my neck of the woods, but I did manage to find a bit of time to do some sewing. I'm really starting to make some progress on my Hope Valley improv quilt, it's actually starting to look like something, which is exciting. Especially after the initial dread I felt after chopping it up into pieces. Do you have a fabric collection that you can't bear to cut into? Hope Valley is one of those lines for me, I've been hoarding it, just waiting for the perfect project for it, until I decided that I just wanted to use it. I wanted something made out of it that I can enjoy, rather than walking by where it sits on my fabric shelves and eyeing it longingly.



So I chopped it up. Eek! I'm using a pattern in Quilting Modern by Jacquie Gering and Katie Pedersen, one of my favorite quilting books. This pattern is found in the modern crazy piecing section, which is the section of the book where I want to make every single quilt! This one is called Winter Windows, and is done up in beautiful muted blues and grays in the book, so I'm hoping that my bright color scheme won't totally ruin this quilt.

I'm happy with how it's working out so far. I've gotten to the point now where I'm starting to assembly the crazy pieced strips with background fabric and then with the accent solids. I'm loving these solids together - I think I might just have to do another project with this color scheme at some point!
My background fabric is Essex Yarn Dyed Linen in Flax. I had initially intended to do a mix of fabrics for the background, subbing in some Essex Linen in Natural and maybe another light colored chambray, but I didn't like how they looked together ultimately. The colors are quite similar, but the other linens just don't sparkle the way the yarn-dyed one does, so I'm sticking with it.

I'm nearly halfway through putting the two swaths of crazy pieces together, so that means hopefully that I'll have a quilt top to share soon! Stay tuned! I hope you all had a great weekend, and have a wonderful Monday :)