I am visiting my mom for Christmas; look what she has on her bed!  

I have often admired One Block Wonder (OBW) quilts, and vaguely considered making one.  But since making one involves buying the same panel or print six or seven times, it's an expensive buy-in.  So when I discovered a website that would mock-up what a OBW quilt would look like with any given fabric, I decided to have some wholly digital fun, for a buy-in of $0 and 0¢. 

I wonder if I can design my own Foundation Paper Piecing (FPP)?  (Of course I can.)  I wonder if the cracked ice research I did may help?  (Why the heck not!) 

When my mom and I left East Africa, we went to Liberia, in West Africa, to visit the family of our stateside Liberian friend.  We took a lot of pictures of people there, to bring back to our friend who hadn't seen his family in years.  This photo, of Grandma with her grandson Shadrach, is lovely.  I decide to use my compass method to see if I can cracked-ice it into FFP slices. 

Some quilts -- like my Memories of Africa Quilt or my Dandelion quilt -- start with a plan.  I sit down and draw an idea, pick my fabrics, and work my way toward a fore-visioned end.  I love working like that, because I can bring an idea into reality!  But those quilts tend to be thinky quilts, and sometimes I don't have the reserves to think my way through my hobby.  Lately, I've been getting home from work at 6:30pm, and it's dark, and I have just enough space in my brain for a little Foundation Paper Piecing... before I feel my focus slip, like a car falling out of gear.  I get maybe a half-hour of concentration, and then I find myself picking the wrong fabric for the pattern and having to rip seams, or just staring at the same piece for a while doing nothing.  I desire to be creative, but sewing to a plan leads to frustration. 

That's why I like to have a second project at the same time, a non-thinky project.  The Acid Trip, Scrappy Double Wedding Ring, and today's featured project are all examples of what I think of as "blank verse" projects.