A Twinkly Tale

One of the very good reasons I don't want to go haring off making a kaleidoscope quilt is because I have a mission.  When my daughter and family were in the Netherlands, she bought some beautiful fabric with an eye toward making a quilt.  While I was visiting, we got to talking quilts, and I showed her a couple of pictures of quilts that I was dithering about considering making for her daughter.  The upshot was that I decided which quilt to make for my granddaughter (her brother is getting the monkey quilt, in case y'all haven't guessed by now), and I'll also be making one for my daughter and son-in-law for their significant anniversary coming up.  AND I get to use the Netherlands fabric for both.
Since the anniversary quilt is the only one with a deadline, I'm starting with that one. 
Here are some of the lovely fabrics:

 and with some from my stash added in:

 Then I started testing backgrounds.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

I realized that all the above were too cold.  Definitely something warmer was called for.

Well, that's more like it.   Unfortunately, there's only a fat quarter of that, but clearly I was on a better track.

So I went fabric shopping and found this, which is creamier looking in person, but still subtle.

A test block was called for, so I pulled a couple of fabrics and opened them up. 
Imagine my surprise when I found that they only looked like fat quarters - they were really something else entirely.
Here's one with a fat quarter next to it for comparison:

They're about 10" (so probably a quarter meter) by the full width of fabric - which is way more than our usual 42-44".  I laughed when I realized I'd made a completely unwarranted assumption.  Just because it looks like a fat quarter...

And here's the part that's helping me resist the Call of the Kaleidoscope:

I've been drooling over these twinkle star blocks over at Life in Pieces for months.  And months.  For bonus points, they call for using my tri-recs rulers, which are technically new since I haven't actually played with them much since I got them. 
So I made a sample block, and then cobbled together a mockup of the setting.

The sashing in the picture is just a couple of 2.5" strips I pulled out of stash, but now that I look at it, that fabric would work.  Unfortunately, I only have a tiny bit of it, and I suspect that it's decades old, so totally unattainable.  But it does give me a few ideas on what to look for.

But that blue square I'd chosen for the center of the block started to irk me.  Not right.  Not right at all.
So I dug some more, cut a square, and tried it:

Much better.

And, since I'll be generating a lot of bonus triangles with this quilt, I decided to get right on top of them from the beginning.  Each block will generate four of the big HSTs and eight of the small ones.  Notice that the small ones are actually mirror images of each other, four and four.  I don't know what I'll do with them yet, but I have a feeling they'll be fun to play with.

And there were monkeys.

 Because of course there were monkeys.  At some point I need to count and see how many I have.  I'm starting to wonder if I'll be able to stop, even when I have hit 'sufficient monkeys'...



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