A New Quilt Top and an Old Cardigan

My first project of the new year is well underway- in fact, it's already a quilt top.  In starting this quilt, I decided I wanted simple patchwork with a riot of color.  With this in mind, I pulled together a stack of favorites, old and new (no low-volume prints) and settled on the simple half square triangle.

There's a certain pleasure in the whole quilt-making process.  The tranquil task of sewing small pieces of fabric into blocks under the needle of a machine.  Pressing these blocks into smooth squares under a hot iron.  Watching your fabric selections and blocks manifest themselves into the vision that started the whole process. And finally, that moment after the entire top is pressed, when you hang it up or lay it on the floor, step back and just take in the whole thing. 

It's exactly what I envisioned and I'm very happy with it.

I've started the back, and I'm none too pleased with it.  I decided to use leftover hst's with some yardage of Paper Snowflake from Meadow Sweet.  Not content to just sew the hst's up into a couple of rows and frame them, I decided on a scattered effect.  This led to the (perceived) need for more hst's to be made.  Which then led to quilt maths to decide how to cut the low volume yardage for maximum efficiency given the "random" hst layout.  Which led to my pulling out this old project (from 2011!) to give my head a break. 

Here is the Maple Street Cardigan, fresh out of it's holding place in a bag of scraps (I did pick off the threads and fluff before photographing it):

Thank goodness I noted where I left left off when I put it down.  It's been over a year-and-a-half since I've worked on this so I'm a little concerned about gauge.  The thought of frogging and starting over, complete with gauge swatching, entered my mind for a teeny moment, but I quashed it.  It'll block out, right?!

Now I've just got to remember where I put the rest of the yarn during the big move.