progress at last

I'm done with the quilting on the first set of Orange Crush blocks. I really need a better name for this quilt...right now it is being referred to at home as the Jeanette quilt in reference to the intended recipient. Since I found no navy binding lurking in my bin and I don't want to cut up the rest of that fabric just yet, binding & washing will have to wait, but I can move on for now.
I didn't want these extra 4 patches to feel lonely in the (overflowing) scrap bin so they got to be part of the border.

And this is what's next:

I've been wanting to do something with 1930's reproduction fabrics for a while so I bought a jelly roll at the quilt show earlier this summer. I don't think I'll do that again. I felt very constrained by the limited size of of the strips. I think I would have been better served by a set of fat quarters, but the strips did work nicely into diamonds and the pieced diamonds will be set with alternating plain ones in a scrappy argyle pattern.

I pieced a lot of these diamonds as leader/enders while putting together the Not Orange Crush top which I don't normally do. First, my day job involves a lot of multi-tasking, so I like to avoid it at home as much as possible, and secondly my space is pretty limited and I'm not very neat so having two WIP projects out at once makes a huge mess and makes me want to retreat to the other side of the basement and surf the internet instead of sewing. In the normal course of things I tend to spend the time I'm piecing thinking about the person that will receive a quilt and when I love that person or even feel pretty friendly toward them it's very pleasant. In this case, the quilt is kind of obligatory, and the more I think about the person who will receive it the less motivated I get so I had to sneak these pieces past my psyche in order to get this thing done.