(Geez, I’m getting carried away with blogging, here! After this post I’d better get back to sewing…)

Have you heard about the Process Pledge?

I, Sandi, pledge to talk more about my processes, even when I can’t quite put them in the in words or be sure I’m being totally clear. I’m going to put my thinking and my gut feelings out there.

r0ssie, group owner of the Fresh Modern Quilts pool on Flickr and an amazing blogger, has pledged to post more about the process of quilting instead of just the finished quilts. She’s invited us to join her. She makes some interesting points about the definition of modern quilting and how quilt bloggers can grow (and help others grow) by thinking about and posting about the process behind their quilts. Check out her Mutant Quilting post, where she spills her thoughts.

So… I have several projects in various stages of completion, and I’ll post updates, starting with…

Ryan’s Quilt – for the neighbor boy whose high school graduation party is in a couple of weeks. This was inspired by the Crayon Quilt by Because I’m Me, which in turn was inspired by 4 squared by Cluck Cluck Sew. Because the quilt is for a young man, I needed something decidedly UN-flowery, UN-girly, and UN-fussy. Mom and I will be working on this together, so it needed to also be un-complicated. (Not that either one of can’t handle complicated, but combining complicated stuff made by two different people can be nerve-wracking!) I pulled a bunch of blue and brown fabrics, trying to eliminate the girly ones, and came up with this stack:

I am using these same fabrics for my Family Basket BOM, but that’s another post. Whenever I choose a new fabric for the BOM, I cut two 3″ strips for Ryan’s quilt. I sewed some of the blue strips together in four different sets of four, then sub-cut them into 3″ strips. One of each set got sewn together to form the block. I will do the same with the brown strips and more of the blues. I’m a little annoyed at my lack of attention during the blue strips because I repeated a couple of fabrics in the blocks. I’ve decided to let it go, because no one but me will really care. Do you have trouble letting stuff like this go, too?

I’ll assemble the quilt by alternating blue and brown square and set it all off with tan sashing – I have a Kona Cotton that is exactly the color of paper bags. As I said, I do everything in EQ6 first, so here’s what I hope it will look like: