Why do you create?

What is it that drives you as an artist?

Do you enjoy the accolades from friends and family?  Have to do SOMETHING with the stuff you collect? Have to get the ideas out of your head before you go crazy?

Well those are my three anyway (in reverse order).  It is well known in my social group that if I don't do something creative every couple of days, I start to go a little twitchy.  If I leave it longer I start getting a bit silly on it and come up with backwards Wednesday where we eat dinner on a picnic rug on the floor with our clothes on backwards and food in glasses and drinking out of bowls... Give it a week and I get frustrated that I cant just DROPEVERYTHINGANDWRAPTHATTREEINPINKANDORANGESTRIPEDDOILLIES!

Deep breath.

And this is my my enabler will gently steer me in the direction of the sewing table as needed.

..--..

So about a year and a half ago, one of the ladies in my regular sewing circle challenged me to make a Baltimore Album styled quilt.  She had a lovely William Morris machine applique quilt she was planning on making and we decided to have a bit of a race. 

So I started researching block patterns for what was going to be my lovely baltimore.  I had high hopes.  I adore baltimores.  One of the ladies in my quilt guild does exquisite ones like this:

Fyvie's Baltimore Album VIII at the 2012 Stonestead outdoor quilt festival

Then I realised that all of those carefully chosen and beautifully balanced colours one that lovely clean white background would drive me nuts - and be expensive as I don't have a lot of those "traditional" fabrics just lying around.  So I bought some mustard yellow background fabric, assembled a mix of cross blocks from a lovely book (cant find the name of it right now, will update later) and tradition blocks I'd drafted and got out my scrap bins. If the piece was big enough to fit then that was my patch.  Blow trying to plan colours!

One year later:

Mustard Madness several blocks quilted

I quilted each block individually and then sashed them together:

And almost finished!  I'm on the final stretch.  I can't wait to get this finished and some outdoor shots to show the colour properly.

Yay! Binding!