This pattern is Haberdashery, by Lori Holt of Bee in My Bonnet Co.  Someone gave it to me, and I can't find it on her website (though it looks like it was part of her currently unavailable "Fashion Fun" collection), so I don't know if you can buy it; it might have been an exclusive in Fat Quarter Shop's Sew Sampler subscription box.  The repeating motif of hats is darling, and simple enough to be a palate cleanser between more complicated projects. 

​This is a quick project: a few nights of cutting and counting squares until I have enough; a few nights of assembly, and the top is now tucked away in a bag of to-be-quilted items.  I don't have much to say about the sewing.  However, I'd like to honor Lori Holt's wish from her "About Me" page on her website: "​My wish is that my designs . . . will inspire others to create and will also instill the desire to pass down the valuable lessons of days gone by taught to us by our mothers and grandmothers."

Another baby is joining my family!  My previous nieces are my sister’s children, but this niece-to-come is my brother’s.  For my other nieces, I’ve been making “big girl quilts” when they are a bit older, but in this case, as I haven’t met my sister-in-law yet, I decide to make a baby quilt to welcome the mother into the family as well as to wrap and cherish the baby once she’s born.  My brother told me his wife’s favorite color is lilac. 

Every crafter has half-finished projects.  Sometimes, we let them go -- half-finished -- for someone else to play with. 

Last year, I acquired a bunch of fabric from someone else, which included twelve hand-sewn nine-patches.  The stitching was pretty close to the raw edges, only an eighth-inch seam allowance, which made me nervous about fraying in the wash!  But I was charmed by these sweet, lopsided nine-patches, and decided to set them in some brown scraps (leftover from another crafter's plundered kit).  

Last year, at the Northwest Quilters' Guild's Festival of Quilts, I saw a selection of "mini quilts".  Most were doll-bed sized.  I remember looking at them and thinking two things simultaneously: 

1. What's the point of a tiny quilt?
and 
2. I can make it tinier!

So one day, I took a post-it note for foundation paper, and marked one-inch squares on it.  Within those squares, I marked the lines of a pineapple block.  This picture shows several stages of the process in one frame: the back of the quilt-top, half made, half bordered, half-un-papered!  

But let's look at more pictures.  

I have mentioned before that I dislike Gee's Bend quilts.  This is a rare opinion... people tend to love Gee's Bend quilts, or at least praise them.  Good for them!  I am all for people loving art that speaks to them.  What interests me today is the squirming cringe I feel when I say I don't agree.  Why do I feel constrained to pad my opinion, when I give it, in a lot of stuffing about how great the quilts are, really, even if they're not my thing?  That psychology interests me more than the quilts themselves! 

Remember how I said the 1970's scrap fabric would have to wait ("A Groovy New York Beauty")?  

It didn't wait long!  One day when I was wiped out from school and didn't want to work on my Meadow quilt, I pulled out the 70's scraps, and began making blocks.  

Previously, I had settled on a layout for my Tritanomaly Quilt featuring Tula Pink fabric... but I didn't put it together immediately, because I wasn't excited about it.  But then, I realized that I had enough blocks to make two lap quilts, and that I might like the colors better if I separated the pink from the orange, so I went back to the design wall to experiment.  The result is a smaller 3-yard quilt, suitable for a child or a throw quilt for a couch, and I know just the child who will be delighted with it! 

For layout, I sew all the pink/blue churn dashes together with the Protea print blocks, taking care that all of the flowers face the same direction so the quilt has a definite up and down orientation.  I border the entire thing with pink, and corner it with blue.  I layer it with a frankenbatting and back it with an old, 100% cotton sheet, yellow.  Time to quilt! 

I visited the Quiltopia quilt show in Salem, OR last year with a non-quilting friend.  She said "Oh, it's so sad that this is a dying art!".  Queried I: "What makes you think it's dying?", and she responded by pointing out the aging demographic she saw... that most of the people at the show were middle-aged to elderly.  She worried that they would age and die, and thus would perish quilting!  But, I countered, the middle-aged-to-elderly demographic is constantly renewed, as people age into it!