I have embarked on a grand journey. Grand in the sense that it will be large, fairly scary, and take me far from my comfort zone, like Pooh’s Grand Adventure.

Earlier this year, I finished a quilt affectionately named The Kitchen Sink. This lead to some confusion when my sister asked what I was doing that day on the phone and I answered her without context, which means she heard me reply, “I’m basting the kitchen sink.” A strange activity, to be sure. The quilt gets its name from the saying, because I dislike that the kitchen sink gets left out. “Everything but the kitchen sink.” If you’re going to put EVERYTHING in something, why leave anything out, and why always the kitchen sink, I ask you? When I was planning this quilt, I started with the fabric. A while back I had ordered some Free Spirit fabric mystery boxes that the old Craftsy site used to sell, and there a few hits, but boy were there a lot of misses. For one reason or another, a lot of the prints just were not my particular jam, so they were relegated to the back of my cabinet. Every time I got one of them out, I decided not to use it.

Finally fed up with that, I decided to get out all the prints I didn’t like, cut them up, and put them ALL in one big quilt. By golly, I was going to use that stuff up. I started stripping the yardage, and then laid out strips of each fabric on the floor to have a good look at them. First, I arranged them by color family, and I didn’t care for that… but when I arranged them by value it really clicked. The seeds of design ideas began to germinate; I did a little math (code: a lot of math) and began cutting the strips up into what would become a French braid style quilt – I thought a good way to highlight the dramatic value range I had accidentally conglomerated.

It turns out all each of these prints needed was a little love and lot of neighbors, because I absolutely love this quilt. To have created something I love – with fabrics that at one time or another I was annoyed even took up space in my cabinet – has been a profound learning experience. This quilt is what really inspired me to actually sit down and teach myself design and publishing software so that I could write the pattern. Every time I made a quilt from my own designs, I toyed with the idea of writing patterns, but never did the legwork. Well legwork accomplished.

Spring is just coming around to Minnesota. This means everything is that lovely waterlogged brown that happens for a couple weeks after the snow melts but before anything starts to grow again. But! The birds are chirping, and butts are no longer freezing off at the mere sound of an opening door. And! The completed pattern for The Kitchen Sink is with a copy editor, a glorious woman. I will be putting out a call for pattern testers in the coming days, and there’s no turning back now! Perfect time for a photo shoot before the rain we are supposed to get this week.

Wouldn’t you know it, my favorite shot is the one with the two-year-old photo-bomber sneaking up behind me, lollipop in hand.