Where have I been? I’ve been around but had nothing quilt-related to write about or photograph. Thankfully, something finally jolted me out of the creative doldrums!

It’s called Mariner’s Whirl, which is a Jinny Beyer design (Beyer 382-12) for which three sizes of Inklingo collections (12″, 16″ and 20″) were released. That was what really got me back to working on projects but – surprising myself completely, I chose the 20″ collection to make first. I have ideas about making something with the 12″ size as well, but I wanted to play with the largest size.

And it is large – really large! To me, this is an enormous block. I’ll appliqué it to a background after I figure out exactly what I’m making.  I’m playing with the idea of making 3 more and turning it into a bed runner or possibly 5 more for a small lap quilt.  Right now, I’m just thrilled that this got me excited about quilting again!

The centre is a hexakaidecagon with 16 sides. Very short sides, but 16 sides. I have a fabric with enough repeats to have used it for the 16 spikes but I decided to fussy cut the centre and just enjoy piecing it. And oh, how I enjoyed it! Once the three pieces of the first spike element are sewn together, there are opportunities for continuous piecing. And yes, I did hand piece it and was almost chortling with glee as I did so.

Sometimes I look at the back of blocks and think I’d love to figure out how to make them as the front of a different block – and this is one of those. I haven’t graded the seams yet, so I’ll do that before I start the second one. I have the pieces ready for the second but I’ll be using two different fabrics in the second one. I’m just having fun looking at fabrics that will work with the purple batik and the floral fabric from which I cut the centre.

Now that I’ve got this to play with, I really want to do a more complex Mariner’s Compass type of block. I keep looking in the Jinny Beyer Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns and drooling over the group of blocks like that. There’s one – Slashed Star (Beyer 378-10) that would be so easy with an Inklingo collection for it.  Or perhaps another of Jinny Beyer’s own designs – Sea of Knowledge (Beyer 378-9). Oh, how I hope Linda Franz reads this and some other Inklingo’ers do as well and there’s a large group of us that would like collections for another one or two of these amazing blocks.The effects, depending on fabrics used, seem endless.

This is such a relief! I love being excited about sewing complex blocks – it definitely beats week after week after week when I sewed not a stitch. I’d get everything ready to work on a project and it would sit. If I was doing well, I’d thread a needle and maybe sew half a seam but there were many evenings not even that happened. Instead I was doing multiple sudoku puzzles every evening, wandering about aimlessly on the Internet looking at pictures of quilts, recipes, you name it. I finally mentioned it to a friend who told me that running into a period like this happens to lots of creative people. That made me feel better and I stopped stressing about it.

“Sailor’s Dance”

Baxter had been very busy getting all his toys just where he wanted them – to snooze on!