Let there be…dark

Our bedroom is on the back of the house, over the garage.  Two very bright lights illuminate this end of the drive going by the garages of the 12 houses on this cul-de-sac.  While these lights are nice at night when you're outside, unfortunately they shine in our windows.  So recently we decided to get some black-out fabric to attach to the draperies, to see if it would darken our room.  Yesterday I finished sewing on the panels, and indeed our room is now much darker!  On its own, the black-out fabric (which is white on one side and cream on the other) looks fairly innocuous, but when you put it behind the drapes or even by itself up to the window, it's like another wall almost.  It's often used in hotel room windows.

I've begun work on another quilt.  When I was cutting down scraps last spring, I cut lots of small pieces into 1 1/2 inch squares, and these are the ones I'm using for this project.  Originally the plan was to just sew the squares to each other, a style called Postage Stamp quilt.  But recently I saw this arrangement using strips of white to separate the colored squares.  Not only does the white add brightness to the work, my scraps will go farther.  Each block will finish at 10 inches or so and has 50 little squares; alternating the direction of the strips means seams don't have to match.  This reminds me of some candy we used to get as children--individually wrapped rectangles of white nougat with blobs of brightly colored jelly.  Remember those?  I have no idea yet how big this will end up being.  It's been fun so far, but I'm not sure I'm willing to make it very big.  Stay tuned!