Quilting without a pattern

So I’m creatively challenged… I’ve never been one to enjoy colouring outside the lines. I always admired people who can paint beautiful landscapes, or sew clothes without a pattern or design quilts from scratch. I need a pattern… I need to be able to follow directions and the only step where my creativity is going to somewhat come out is in the choice of fabrics.

All that being said, I had a really cute “Recipe for Friendship” panel and fat quarters in my stash that I was dying to use but could never find a pattern for. So I decided to start from a pattern that used a panel (although not the same size as the one I had) and try and alter the pattern so it would fit the fabric. Now I didn’t have any yardage to work with, only fat quarters, so the sashing and border were a bit of a challenge. This is what the end result looks like:

I’m not crazy about it, but for a first attempt at “colouring outside the lines”, I’m thinking it’s not bad. Once it’s quilted and the binding is put on, I’ll probably hang it up in the kitchen at the cottage. Maybe I’ll even use some of the coordinating fat quarters to make place mats from scratch… with no pattern!

I received block 5 of the Mystery BOM last week so put the block together this weekend... really like this one:

And I thought I'd finish this post with a couple of pictures from last weekend. The first one is the beautiful sunset we saw on the way to the cottage on Friday night:

And this one is what I woke up to Sunday morning!!!

Can you believe it?! This picture was taken on October 31... not December 31!

That's it for now! Talk to you all later!