Belated 4th & Designs in the works

Finally, we had a very nice and hot summery day. Too bad it took getting to July 4th to finally have that. Besides having to cook too much, our 4th was good. And simple. Too simple. No swimming. It would have been a great lake or beach day, as we typically do, but this year was a different year. No big lake party held to attend. Too bad.

I have made progress on my baskets quilt. It's off the frame, and naturally I discovered 2 three square sections that I missed stitching the background filler. Go figure. It's not quite ready for a binding! I'll show pictures in a couple days.

Until then, I have been puttering with many new designs. I want to make a quilt that once again, uses much of my stash fabrics. Some of my new designs do a better or not-so-better way of doing this, but then. I also want a quilt that has a decent bit of hand applique since I am better able to do this in the evenings, and I do my customer quilt obligations in the early morning & afternoons. Ideally, the quilt design will have good open spaces for quilting designs too.

The first 2 designs allow me to use a curved cross-hatch ruler to creatively fill the spaces around the appliqued circles, which would very likely also be bordered with a 3/8"-1/2" bias strip.
I have many green prints I hope to use in the use in the quilt, and although I like these designs, neither really accomplishes this goal. Plus they both require I buy a good bit of background fabric.

This next one was actually the first layout I played with, and it does use many different green prints. It also requires much paper piecing, which is really not my favorite thing. In the end, it needs some refinement because it reminds me of a cross between a mine-field and a frog in a blender. Probably not the best quilt names, but maybe they'd be memorable!My last designs are not unique. I have wanted to do a dresden plate quilt for a while. It's relatively easy stitching, a pro for construction, but a con if this is a competition quilt. It will use many of the green fabrics. But like others, requires nearly 5 yards of background fabric. Obviously, I have a hard time making a small quilt. I figure I may as well make it fit a bed if I go to all that trouble! It has a decent amount of machine quilting space, though not an overload. I'm thinking of using a collection of scrappy tans for the background of the plates.

But I'm not sure if I want fewer, and larger plates...or more smaller plates (below). Thoughts?? Guess it all depends on how ambitious I feel like getting.

It's hard to design a great quilt. I have many competing needs...size, ability to finish, how much fabric I must buy, how I think it will show and compete, the overwhelming desire to only create my original designs, etc. That last one is hard. How could I make the very classic Dresden plate pattern original??

Oh well, I'm off to the beach today. It's gonna be a sizzler here. Yay!!