Spanish Treasure

First, I finished up my fourth and last Gothic Windows block on Tuesday night and last night I got them put together and basted (so easy and simple with a scrap of batting and a fat quarter as backing!) to be quilted.  I thought I'd use a red thread to do some hand quilting on the purple background, so we'll see how that turns out.  I'm on the road this weekend so I should be able to make considerable progress on this when I'm not near a machine.

I also got out my other new-to-the-blog project last night.  I began working on it around the holidays when I was too busy to do much blogging.  It's from the book "Nickel Quilts" by Pat Speth and the design is called "Tillie's Treasure." 

(This is just the picture of the cover from amazon.com - I don't think clicking here will help you see inside!)

Well, I chose to use all Kate Spain fabrics from both her Terrain and Good Fortune lines, so I'm calling it "Spanish Treasure."  I just love working with these fabrics, and there are SO many of them with such gorgeous color and variety that it was a joy to cut and to piece.

At first I thought some of the prints would be too large scale for this design, but I stood on my chair and took this photo of the blocks laid out on my folding table, and I love the way it looks.  I know the colors will blend and soften a lot when it's all pieced, quilted and washed.

It's been a long time since I made a quilt purely for the joy of the process.  There's something about Kate Spain's fabric that makes that possible for me.

There's a lot of chatter in the blogosphere lately about housekeeping items like what people like to see on a blog and technical items like word verification.  I have a blogiquette question ... what is the proper way to deal with comments?  When I began with blogger almost nine years ago - although it was not a quilt-related blog - it was commonplace to reply to comments with your own comment and continue the post discussion with readers in the comment area.  These days, I see many more bloggers hit reply to comments I leave and take the discussion offline ... which is good, because I rarely go back to read other comments after I've left one.  Is there a proper blogging comment etiquette?  Do you expect a reply when you leave a comment, or feel disappointed if you don't get one?  If you keep a blog, do you reply to every comment?  Do you ever return to the post to see if a reply was posted there, or reply if it's at your own blog?  I'm curious about whether I'm doing this "right" so thanks in advance for answering!