The other book I found on my shelf this week was Valori Wells’ Radiant New York Beauties.

Here’s an Amazon.ca buy link.

Here’s a buy link at C&T publishing.

And here is Valori Wells website.

I like her use of stripes and plaids, and also her playful freeform quilting. It’s a joyous little book. 🙂

Carnival Beauty is the quilt on the cover, although that only shows part of it. Here’s a picture from inside the book that I took:

I like that there’s a kind of a gradient in her quilt top, with the bottom being darker than the top, although I didn’t manage to accomplish that myself.

I was very excited to realize how much I’ve finished on my quilt top. Here’s my progress so far:

You can see that I need three more little suns to finish the top in this layout. Looking at this photo, I have a feeling that I was going to move that top yellow sun up half a row so it didn’t line up with the pink one so well (they’re not sewn together yet) then add more little suns around it. (That would also explain why there are two more blue background squares cut.)

Clearly, I prefer my suns being whole. 🙂 I added rick-rack around a few of them (to make them more radiant) and that’s fun, too. In the project stash, there is also some trim with mini pom-poms, so that might end up in the finished top. (Maybe around the border. Hmm.) I really like it so far and am pleased with the fussy-cutting and piecing.

This one also requires me to dig back into the stash and search for fabrics to finish up this top. Sounds like a trip to the attic is on the agenda for this weekend! This top is an exciting find as it’s almost done, and the size means I’ll be able to quilt it myself. I’m also excited that many Kaffe Fassett yarn-dyed stripes are available again, so I’ll be able to add some of them into those little suns that need making.

Tomorrow, we’ll have a look at a finished quilt. 🙂