A cascade of quilts

I only intended to make one quilt, happy to be taking a class with Bill Kerr and to be using African fabrics that I'd been given a while ago, as I've previously written up.

But the construction of this quilt left me with a lot of half-square triangles, so I started playing with the print triangles.  In my earlier post about this, I forgot to mention that I was strongly influenced by a quilt made by Wanda Hanson, using all African fabrics cut in half-hexagon shapes. She first posted about this some weeks ago; here's a post with a photo of the finished quilt. I liked that Wanda put the fabrics right next to each other, no sashing or borders. I also thought that the combination of angled and straight edges added liveliness to the design--more so than simple squares or rectangles--and wondered how it might look using triangles. Well, now I had a chance to try out that idea!  I am still working on a final layout, but I've decided to go with the idea that Kathy Loomis suggested in a comment on my previous post:  "You could put them both [blocks with a central diamond all one fabric and blocks with each triangle a different fabric] into the same quilt!! Would be less predictable if the regular block pattern were broken up."  Thanks Kathy! This way I get the best of both worlds--some stability from the one-fabric diamonds, but with the liveliness of every other block being 8 different fabrics. (I highly recommend a visit to Kathy's website--inspiring work.)

This one will be a lap-size quilt. In the photo below (about half the eventual size), blocks are tentatively placed on the design wall. I won't sew them together until I have more blocks done and have played around with placement.

Finally, I wanted to do something with the green and blue triangles leftover from the first quilt. I pieced them together, thinking I could use them as part of the backing for the first quilt. But I think they look quite nice themselves, so I put on wide borders from some pale green hand-dyed fabric I had on hand, and voila, another top for a baby quilt. It is satisfying to get a very quiet quilt from the same source as the rambunctious one above.

And something I meant to mention in the post about the class I took: Bill brought with him a lot of fabric, books, and kits from Modern Quilt Studio, and I couldn't resist the kit for "Tube Socks." This is the first kit I've ever bought, as for me one of the chief pleasures of quilting is the selection of fabrics. In this case, I really liked their new fabric line, Warp & Weft, but didn't have anything in mind I would use it for. So when I saw the kit for this fun quilt, I indulged myself.