I had a lot of fun today cutting out buildings, the taxi and scooter. It’s nice when things start taking shape. The buildings are gaining detail, and I’m trying to make them a little darker to match the sky and push them into the background. You can see I move around the quilt, not completely finishing one area. This is a habit from my painting background: always work the whole canvas. The colors in the background effect the foreground and vice versa.

I’ve experimented a little with cutting a few windows and part of a tower. When I block in color with big pieces of fabric, it sometimes misleads the eye. The towers will be thin lines, but as I hoped, the bright yellow color against the red will give them prominence in the composition. I’m pretty sure the purple on the scooter is too dark, but I’ll try to adjust that later when I have more of the objects in place.

And just in case there’s not enough going on, I started another quilt. Maybe a case of too much green tea and carmel corn (not at the same time though.) It’s also because now I have another design board in my studio, so I have room to lay out another project. I’m interested to see if I can work on two quilts at once. It seems like I often lose momentum between projects, so I’m wondering if overlapping projects will prevent that down time.

Besides, both these quilts are bigger than any I’ve done before. Maybe getting that Viking machine and Inspire frame has gone to my head. When the drawings came out of the printer, I was a little intimidated. They were even bigger than I expected! But the Yankee Doodle quilt will probably be easier to quilt, so I’d like to start with that one first.

I’ve had the idea to do a red, white and blue quilt for a while, so I’ve been collecting fabrics that have stars and stripes. Whoever thought up the colors for our flag was clever — it’s a handsome combination. I think if I use too much starry fabric, it could become cliche, so I’ll have keep trying to push past that.