Midnight inspiration

 

Just before midnight last night I had a sudden idea. I was sitting in bed with my iPad, looking at "quilty" pictures online when it suddenly hit me - I can quilt this pinwheel quilt using a decorative stitch in the ditch. I've used this technique on a couple of wall hanging/table runner sized pieces, but it suddenly dawned on me that it could work very well for this design. 

 

So at midnight I was downstairs in my basement sewing room, looking at backing options. Keep in mind that the lighting in my sewing room is pathetic in the daytime and at night it's even worse.  I really need to do something about that soon!  Anyway, I found a possible backing that is a leftover from another project, and it seemed to be a good option even in the bad lighting. And I had a perfectly sized piece of leftover batting on the top of the stack of leftover batting in the closet.

 

This photo doesn't do any of the colors justice, but I hung the backing and the flimsy over my front porch railing this morning to see if the color worked in real daylight.  I like it. This backing is a "dusty" version of a couple of the greens in the pinwheels.  Now that I have a plan I'm quite excited to get to work on it.

 

And here lies my next problem . . .

 

 

My husband and I both work from home.  I now have the upstairs home office with the great windows.  He has a perfectly good office space in the basement with a big desk, expensive ergonomic chair for his bad back, good lighting, storage, double computer monitors, big screen TV, pool table, sofa, etc.  But periodically he comes back upstairs and works at the dining room table. With the hard wooden chair.  And, since I used that basement space for years as my office - before the extra comforts - I know EXACTLY why he is upstairs. It's because it's a dungeon with almost no natural light.  And it gets really chilly in spring and fall when the heating/cooling system hardly runs at all.

 

And my problem is that I usually use my dining room table to lay out a quilt for sandwiching and pin basting. Guess that's not happening this morning.