A Project Begins

I've had several ideas percolating around in my head for awhile now (which isn't hard to do cuz there's lots of holes in there). I tend to frequent estate sales and have gathered quite a few black, white, and grey pieces of fabric and clothing that gave me the itch to do a black and white crazy quilt. I mulled this over and played with names and themes; however, it just wasn't jelling. I was afraid I would get bored with such a constrained pallet. But, I had all these black, grey and white fabrics to use and I wanted to use them! So I started thinking about all the things that are black and grey and one that kept coming up was "night" (as in the opposite of day). Hmmmm... lots of possiblities there!

Here are some of the fabrics I had to work with:


Along with some pieces of vintage kimonos I picked up off of eBay a year or so ago (I have more):

Sorry, the fabrics slipped when I put them on the scanner and I didn't have time to fix them!

I let that sit on the back burner for awhile and while perusing a good sale at Overstock.com I came upon these:

and I ordered them. I've seen them before but finally decided to get them because I need a jump start and wanted to do some detailed embroidered motifs on my first real crazy quilt. I was reading through them and pretty much drooling all over the place when I came upon a reference to Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and a huge, blinding, sparkling light went on over my head! Ohhhh.... night and fairies and flowers and love and critters and moonlight and stars and OOOOHHHHHH! Poifect! ;0)

So... the project is to be a crazy quilt depicting "a Midsummer Night's Dream." Not that I'm ambitious or getting in over my head or anything! ;0) I've watched the movie again (the one with Michelle Pfeiffer, Kevin Kline, Stanley Tucci and Rupert Everett) (talk about eyecandy... whoosh) and read through the play a couple of times (Shakespeare takes a couple or ten times). I've made lists of all the visual eyecandy that the play mentions and will be incorporating as much as I can of those visuals into my quilt. The quilt is going to have a center panel of a sleeping Titania surrounded by flowers and woodland things, then crazy patch blocks around that and a wide, all black crazy patched border around that. I figure it will take me at least a year to finish and I'm so excited!!!!!!!! LOL... what a geek I am!