Yesterday

This project is finally finished, and to be honest, I am sorry to be wrapping it up.

The wind and the sun added such character to this picture!

If you are a regular blog reader, you already know that this quilt was inspired by the pattern "Madness"  written by Kathy Doughty of Material Obsession. But what other inspirations did I bring to the process.

Color: inspired by a wedding quilt I made last year for friends.
Fabric: the scrap basket.
Size: I ran out of orange and pink scraps.
Yesterday: this began as nothing more that happenstance. The first two blocks I made are the two in the top left corner. I had been imagining a zigzag row, but after I put the two blocks together I could only see the letter Y. So, being an improv quilt and all, I decided to go with it and I stitched together the big Y.
Also of coincidence, I had started this quilt just a few days before my birthday, and I had been spending a lot of time strolling down memory lane. Those 2 things just kind of blended together and the Y became Yesterday which, in turn, became the focus of the quilt. Finally, I took the time to write out a little list of all the things that had been on my mind so that I could use it as part of the label. In part it reads:

YESTERDAY...
…I was only 40.
...the big challenge of the day was getting 2 babies to nap at the SAME time.
…we lived in a teeny tiny apartment with a lot of doors.
…I had never made a quilt.
...I held my brother’s hand as he died.
…I had a red, white and blue bike with a banana seat and streamers.
…I was 18 and mad at the world (and my mom).
…my little girls couldn’t cross the street without a hand to hold.
…we made payments on my first $100 sewing machine.
…my mom grew tulips in our front yard.
…we would ride our bikes to the park and watch the train go by.
...I had no gray hair.
…we had unauthorized picnics on Sundays afternoons in the backyard while waiting for escrow to close on our new house.
…we drove all the way to Alaska.
…I was a college student.
…I thought I was not artistic.
…I had uterine cancer.
…we hiked Half Dome and Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park
.…I started a business.
…I joined my first friendship circle.
…I was afraid of the dark.
…I drove a blue-green Chevy Suburban with barn doors and V8 power.
…I attended my first International Quilt Market.
…we visited NYC for the first time, and saw Phantom of the Opera on Broadway.
…I married my friend.

A little ordinary mixed in with the extraordinary, a little good and a little bad, a little heartache and a little joy, a little adventure and a little ho-hum... a life well lived and now marked out in quilted beauty.