thoughts for a Sunday morning

“People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.” Mother Teresa (1910-1997)

Crusader's Cross quilt in progress

During this incredibly hot summer, I've been escaping into two favorite movies: Robin Hood (Russell Crowe, of course!)

and Kingdom of Heaven (Orlando Bloom)

so my brain is saturated with images of the crusades (oh, okay! with Russell and Orlando, too!).

ANYWAY, this quilt block bounced around in my imagination until I had to sit down and draft it.

The blocks are rotary-cut and quick-pieced, though the math was a bit tricky. I've set them on point to look like crosses instead of X's. Bright jewel-toned batiks are the crosses. I'm trying to include at least five colors in each block so that the crosses appear to radiate with faceted jewels. My design wall has been handy for working out the color scheme of each block. Deep midnight blue is the unifying background for each block. Each cross is further unified with the same blue and gold crown, and the crowns are creating an interesting secondary design. Here is the quilt so far.

The blocks are 10" square so the quilt is working up quickly. More to come later, and maybe even a tutorial for this block, if anyone is interested.

Test post with ipad

Hubby gave me an ipad for my birthday. Our computer crashed and I lost all of my photos which is why I've been so absent (and silent) on this blog. Hope I can learn to use this new toy and post much more frequently! So here goes with my test post, and a picture of The Man himself -- sweet thing that he is!