Here’s the story behind this one.

First of all, while I’ve not completely finished up all the UP Greens series - quilting, etc, I have so many pinks that I decided to make pink the next series that I work on with my UPcycleds.

I have more than 2 boxes. I have 2 boxes and a big IKEA bag full and I want to work them down to easily two boxes - not stuffed full. I’m not sure how many that will make and I’m not going to work on UP Pinks nonstop at the moment.

More on that in a different blog post.

But pink is a color I really do like. I really can’t call it my favorite color anymore - maybe it used to be. Since quilting, I’ve learned that any color can be wonderful. I do know that this top makes me happy to look at.

Now that’s behind me. Let me continue.

During these past few months, one day I decided to wash the quilt that is on our bed - and it is this one - one of them - at the moment of writing this I have three on our bed.

I hung it on the line to dry as I didn’t want to put it in the dryer, knowing that each of those actions helps wear out a quilt faster (washing and drying). Plus it is SO big that I thought it might take as long to dry as it would to just hang it outside. I’m not kidding. This front loader regularly takes over 3 hours to dry a load - and that means a regular size load, not a huge quilt.

Anyway, at the time we had a guest with us who was helping us with Ukraine stuff - Tim. Having company is really the reason I couldn’t spread it out on the table to dry as we had company and we USE the table when people are here - it is kind of the headquarters for pretty much everything.

When he saw the quilt hanging on the line, he said, “I really like that quilt - you know how some quilts are just too fussy- well that one is really nice”. That was from a person who doesn’t come from a quilting family. Pretty much an honest, unsolicited opinion from a guy. I realize that no two people are the same. Some love those fussy, very complicated quilts. I know as we worked on packing up the donated quilts, we certainly admired them - sometimes gaping at what you all donated.

ANYWAY, I decided to do another one - but with pink plaids. I figured I would have a lot of them, however that wasn’t the case. Apparently ladies don’t wear pink plaid shirts as much as men wear blue plaid shirts - or green plaid. Anyway, I barely had enough to make this quilt. A couple of the prints are more like “printed plaids or similar enough to throw in the mix” and not really a woven plaid like most plaids are.

I also stressed (a little) about whether I should use white or gray as the alternate color. My instinct told me gray - simply because pink is so light and I wanted more contrast than white would give me, but I really like the clear, clean look that the white would have given. However, the design aspect won out and I used gray. This gray used to be a duvet cover and I still had some leftover from other projects. I had a lot of white given to me back in May, and so I have a nice collection again of second hand whites.