I spent many hours the past two months working on two projects that have been on my Quilty Bucket List for the last two or three years. I worked on my version of the 74” x 98” Lake Superior Sunrise Quilt which I am calling Desert Sunset almost every day in May and the first few days of June, with the goal of paper-piecing three of the the 96 templates on a daily basis which took about two hours each day once I had my fabric cut. I tried to not overthink the design and using print fabrics from my stash, formed a loose sunset gradient from purples in the lower right quadrant to yellows in the upper left quadrant. The overall effect is a kind of a controlled chaos. My best friend, Mary, helped design a number of the templates which was fun for her and gave my brain a bit of a break. Below is a photo of a small section of the quilt top:

After I finished my Desert Sunset quilt top, I decided to use leftover triangles from the project to finally make a small (40” square) Cleo quilt top. I’ve wanted to make a version of this quilt for many years, primarily because my mother’s name was Cleo, and she also was a quilter. Originally I was going to make a full spectrum color gradient Cleo quilt, but I decided instead to use sunset colors (Again!!!) and in order to make it much less chaotic than Desert Sunset, I used indigo fabric for all the large triangles in the pattern.

I have sent both of these quilt tops off to Cara with Sew Colorado Quilting for edge-to-edge quilting. I will get both of these back in July and hope to have them both finished by the end of the month.