adventures of a quilting diva

because we all could use a little inspiration every now and then …
The other day I was cooking dinner and just loved the way the veggies looked so bright and cheery in the pan. If my family didn’t need to eat, I just might have set the dinner preparations aside and gone straight to my studio. Instead I settled on a digital photo and postponed the studio session.

Those vegetables have a great color scheme, very warm and inviting. From traditional to folk art to contemporary, all kinds of quilt patterns would look marvelous in these colors (not just food-related ones).

Or get your sketchbook out and draw some veggies. (A farmer’s market would make a great field trip for this.) Detailed, stylized or even abstract. See the circles, half-circles, rectangles, triangles and diamonds in that pan? Make some vegetable appliqué blocks or even some veggie borders.

If the thought of drawing makes you break out in hives, don’t worry. Ruth B. McDowell has a great quilting book, Pieced Vegetables. What’s specially wonderful is that there are patterns for both straight seams and curved seams for all the veggies in Ruth’s book.

I still have that pepper quilt on my mind, and there are 4 different pepper patterns in Pieced Vegetables! The tomato and pumpkin blocks are adorable too. There are a lot of great suggestions for fabric choices and block layouts. Maybe I’ll have to quilt an entire salad! =(^_^)=

Boston Lettuce pattern from Pieced Vegetables by Ruth B. McDowell
made by Violet Vaughnes