At-Home Quilting Retreat Begins

Music Themed Fabrics, mostly from stash

Background fabric

A few fabric possibilities

Cadenza Design Sketch

I'm off of work all this week. My big event this week is to play the piano in the orchestra for the musical Pirates of Penzance for a local high school. Most evenings will be spent in rehearsals, with performances on the weekend. With no day job to go to this week, all I have to worry about is getting to my rehearsals and performances on time. I did the same last year and it worked well for me.

Also, like last year, I'm spending the non-music hours doing an at-home quilting retreat. As it so happens, I'll be working on a music-themed quilt that I've named Cadenza. According to Merriam-Webster, a cadenza is "an impressive solo part usually near the close of a musical composition." Typically the orchestra or pianist/accompanist stops playing while the soloist does his/her thing. My joke definition for cadenza is "Italian for showing off."

My idea for the quilt is to have several rows containing sprinkles of wonky squares that represent musical notes. The squares would be scrappy while the backgrounds will be all the same fabric, a tone-on-tone off-white leaf design. Between the rows would be big chunks of scrappy fabrics, a few of them music-themed.

I already had a bag of fabrics set aside for a music-themed quilt from last November's quilting retreat in Pacifica. I'm using a lot of those, and I pulled more from my scrap collection and stash. So far I have bought just three new fabrics, so much of the quilt will be from stash.

I intend to work on the quilt each day of my vacation, and hopefully have a finished quilt by the end of the weekend.