A quilt for Aenne {work in progress}

I have a new quilt commission. This time it is from none other than my lovely sister. She and her husbeast would like to gift a quilt to her mother-in-law Aenne for Christmas.
Apparently Aenne used to sew a lot in her younger days and is rather impressed by my quilts (my sister has several). So no pressure there.

My head went straight into planning mode when I heard and because Aenne is a keen gardener who has a large vegetable and flower garden I was convinced that Kaffe Fassett and Philip Jacobs would feature largely in the plan.

Then my sister and Aenne trawled my webpage and it turned out that Aenne is much more taken by my modern and contemporary quilts such as the Comet or Tuscan Hills which took me by surprise. But she reasoned that her living room is already full of pattern and colour and a quilt that would be equally as exuberant would be to much. I couldn't agree more.

So the other night my sister and I (she in Germany and me here) had another look at my quilts and those in my favorite section on Flickr and Anja's eye fell on the 'Trajectory' quilt by Megan from monkey beans.This is indeed a quilt I covet and have thought to make for myself one day using my voile fabric collection on black background. My sister thought that those boomerang shapes looked like little swallows or larks flattering in the sky and I really like that notion.

So this was settled and the next step was to choose the fabric. We also spotted in my stash folder my Oakshott 'Lyon' collection that I bought in Feb 2011. At the time when I bought this gorgeous pack of fat eights I was contemplating to use them in my single girl quilt but later decided to go with just solids. I am so glad that we finally found a purpose for these amazing woven fabrics.

The plan is to combine them with a variety of natural Kona solids (such as cream, sand, putty etc.) and then to add the Oakshott fabric for the boomerangs. I'm afraid it will look rather similar to Megan's original with respect to colours but as it is a commission I am ok with it. If it was for myself I would have chosen different colours.

It will be a large lap quilt at 63" x 70 " or 1.8m x 1.6m. My calculations have resulted in 90 blocks at 7 1/2 inches! I created my paper piecing block according to Megan's excellent tutorial and already started paper piecing; 24 done only 63 to go......