Tiny beginnings

I've churned out some 70-odd quilts in my day, starting with the traditional patchwork patterns worked in scrap fabrics and moving on to designing my own appliqué quilts using hand-dyed fabrics.

Along the way, I've made a few tiny quilts for fun or to hang on a wall, but was more focused on bed-size quilts because they seemed somehow more useful. Screw useful. Bed-size quilts become a burden. No one wants them anymore really, because they require too much commitment. They become that heirloom piece that Mom made that doesn't really reflect current tastes in ever-changing bedroom decor but we have to keep anyway and drag out of the closet for visits. You know what I mean.

Oh, and now I live on a sailboat. Making a bed-size quilt isn't exactly easy to do anymore. No room to spread out. No where to store yards of fabric. No funds to buy yards of hand-dyed fabric.

Tiny quilts are very appealing. They don't require lots of fabric, thus solving the storage and funding issues. They don't involve much commitment. No one has to love them or treat them with undue  reverence. They don't take six months to make. Tiny quilts are simply a way to play with fabric. A tiny experiment in color or composition that can quickly evolve to a new color way or composition permutation. Kinda like a sketch.

So here goes a new blog. A place for contemplation and practice, both to write and to focus on expanding my tiny quilts. Not making them bigger, mind you, making more of them. Making them more interesting and full of stories.