Celebrate Romance

Some of these lovely fabrics will be used in a quilt I am going to make for the next challenge for my Yahoo Small Quilt  group.

I will call it "Romance Stars."

If you're not a member, join us in the fun and make a small star quilt using some of your own "romantic" floral fabrics.  If you don't have any, why I think it's a perfect excuse to go out and buy some new fabric. You have my permission, LOL.

I've been collecting some of these prints over the past year or two ( in a romantic floral box, of course) and wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with them.  While I was in the hospital, I was hooked up to an IV drip and couldn't go very far without unplugging and dragging the whole d*** machine with me so, while I rested, the only thing I looked at to relax (when the TV wasn't on) were the pretty floral drapes at the window. A very romantic pattern that made me feel like quilting when I got better.

The challenge deadline is October 4 so I think I'll have plenty of time, barring any health relapses, LOL.

Create your own little quilt design from the block directions.

I've always been drawn to the sentimental and the romantic and some of my undergraduate study centered around the British Romantic poets of the late 18th to early 19th centuries - William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron. As part of an independent study through the English and Art departments, I visited the Lake District in England to see what all the excitement was about.  

"I wandered lonely as a

Cloud

That floats on high o'er

Vales and Hills,

When at once I saw a

crowd

A host of dancing

Daffodils;

Along the Lake, beneath

the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in

the breeze." 

-William Wordsworth, 1807

The British Romantic poets believed that nature and emotion were the places in which one found spiritual truth. Most of the poets attributed to children special innate gifts. According to  Wordsworth - they come from heaven “trailing clouds of glory.” Poetry to them was a “spontaneous overflow of feelings,” often inspired by nature.

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

        -John Keats

After seeing Wordsworth's cottage garden at Dove Cottage, I knew I wanted to plant my own someday. Took me quite a few years but I'm sort of on my way!

So yes, in addition to being a true sentimentalist, I am also a true romantic too. Make a "Romance Star" quilt to celebrate romance . . .

Time for another romantic garden party dinner?