Unintentionally Synchronized Quilt Tops

My friend Melissa and I have been partners in crime in quilting since the beginning, we gravitate toward a lot of the same fabrics, belong to the same quilt guild and often use the same patterns/ideas in our quilts. We have been to Nashville together a couple of times and have shopped fabric together many times. So, from time to time we end up purchasing the same things. This past winter when we were at our favorite Atlanta quilt shop, Intown Quilters, we both picked up a jelly roll of Jane Sassaman fabrics. I looooooove her wild and crazy fabrics and have bought quite a lot of them, but finding something to actually do with them is a whole different story. Really, the hardest thing about them is cutting into them. The patterns are so big and bold that it is hard to get your brain around how to best whack them into little pieces and sew them back together again. That is part of what makes buying a pack of pre-cut fabrics so great, someone already went through and cut them up willy-nilly for you, you just have to focus on the putting them together in some kind of pleasing way. I've been thinking about what to do with my strips for a few weeks, as I was finishing up my last quilt. I was really inspired by this post of ideas for a jelly roll, especially when I remembered I had a ton of 5 inch white squares from a guild fabric swap a while back and decided the white squares bordered by my strips would work perfectly. These are the blocks that I have finished the last couple of days, and it just so happens Melissa has been busily working on her set of the same strips too (we didn't plan it or anything, for once). Aren't they fantastically crazy?!



Be sure to check out her post to see how her strips are getting along with much wilder fabric. Not sure yet how big I'm going to make this one, guess I will just keep making blocks until I get tired of them. Oh, and I'm going to do something in those white squares, just haven't decided which something yet.