Two weeks ago I singed up for Amandajean's Star Quilt Along. For the first week I thought I really should get the colours chosen soon. For the second week I thought I really should get the blocks started soon. There's a lot of “really should”s around here, but now I'm caught up and loving the look of the blocks so far.

The size was the first thing that got me. I love the idea of quilting along, and so joined up when I heard about it. Then I got out the tape measure. 85 inches!!! that's the size of our current double bed quilt. We had been talking about getting (well, me sewing, husband vetting the colours) another quilt for us for a while. This just meant we had to decide faster.

I ferreted through a number of books and enthusiastically left markers on the pages of colour ways that I liked and thought might work. He just looked up from his book occasionally nodded or disapproved. We finally agreed on the colours in this one. At which point my dearest commented that it would take a really long time to cut out all those strips.

It appears he was considering the whole quilt not just the colours, so we will never know if there were any earlier colours schemes that might have been acceptable.

I even sat and watched Saturday's movie with calculator and paper in hand working out yardages. Can you guess what my day job was? Yes, I might need about 7 yards of background, so it is going to be plain. The setting block fabric on the other hand, really needs only 0.7m. Quilting in imperial, buying in metric, gets confusing some times.

I'm delighted with the colours in the end. Little e and I spent about an hour choosing (crawling) around Quilter's Lane trying to find just the right fabrics. I probably discarded two bolts for every one that I settled on. The colours are based around the fabric I used in these dresses. Little e approves, as does my dearest, so it is on with the blocks.