Totally Weird

The coolest thing happened a couple of days ago. It has to do with this book that I have been reading about Vincent Van Gogh called Sunflowers.

I'm not far into it, and actually I'd just picked it up after a few weeks' hiatus to read my book club book. I was trying to remember what had been happening without re-reading too much and that is when this cool thing happened. I was just casually reading along when this word jumped, and I mean that practically literally, jumped off the page at me: Avignon.

I got goose bumps. Really major ones.

Because, you know, I have been working on a project using this fabric called A Breath of Avignon.

Does stuff like that happen to you? I call this sort of thing 'synchronicity' which, according to Wikipedia, is the experience of two or more events, that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s. I didn't know all that until I just looked it up, but I did know the definition.

I think it means I am supposed to be working on this quilt with this fabric at this time. Like maybe all the stars are in perfect alignment for me to create something really awesome. Hmmmm, well that may be exaggerating a bit, but it certainly feels right.

Since I am making up this quilt from parts of several quilt books and patterns, I have been trying to come up with a name for it. In all likelihood, this quilt will be named with this whole coincidence in mind. I'm holding off giving it a name until after it is finished, but I'm thinking that Vincent Van Gogh might get a shout out.

On Monday when Sharon was here to sew, I spent much time figuring out how to proceed with my Avignon project. I had 21 blocks made and sewn into 3 strips of 7 blocks.

I studied the largest piece of border fabric that I had: a red, 2-yard cut with 3 complete borders. I had to really get my thinking cap on because this was math-related. If I had 3 pieced strips, then I would only need two border prints to separate them. If I had 4 pieced strips, then I could use all 3 borders. No waste. No leftovers.

So I got to work making another set of blocks. In that thought process, I also decided that the quilt should be longer and have 8 blocks (instead of 7) in each strip, so I made 11 more blocks. (Man, I hope everyone followed all of that; trying to put into words the way a quilter thinks through a process is not easy!!)

Whether you follow or not, this is how things stand now: I have 4 strips of pieced blocks with 8 blocks per strip. I am ready to cut the border print and sew the strips together. Then I will have a new decision to figure out: how to do borders. I'm thinking a small yellow inner border, but will there be enough fabric to do it? Stay tuned.