Millenium Resurrected

The color of the month for October for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge was brown/black, I think; but that's not part of the plan for my quilt, so I got caught up on my pinks and greens. I don't know what the color is for November yet, of course, but I think I'll probably get caught up on the blues and purples next.

There are only seven different colors in my quilt, so I suppose I'm about done with the Challenge anyway. If I can get all the blocks done by the end of the year and get them sewn together into a top, I guess I'll come up with a new plan for a Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilt and start over in January.

While I was finishing up these two sets of blocks this week, I remembered my Millenium quilt. Anyone remember back in the year 2000, when it was popular to make millennium quilts--a quilt with 2000 pieces--to commemorate the beginning of the next hundred years? I thought (foolishly, perhaps) that it was a good idea to jump on that bandwagon, so I spent weeks looking for a one-patch design or a block design that might lend itself to a millennium quilt. I finally settled on a one-patch triangle and figured out that if I created half square triangle units, I could make a quilt with 1998 pieces by setting the units 27 across and 37 rows down.

I also wanted to make it as a charm quilt, so I traded triangles with a friend of mine that lived in downtown Reykavik, Iceland (we were living there at the time). Between the two of us, we couldn't even come close to cutting 1998 different triangles out of our own fabrics, so I bought a box of 2000 different 4" squares from Keepsake Quilting, who was also celebrating the new millenium. Duplicates were weeded out of the box, and other fabrics were eliminated because I couldn't categorize them as one specific color. Seems to me those were mostly novelties and florals.

Anyway, I worked pretty diligently at it for quite a while but eventually moved on to other projects. In 2002 I dug it back out and got the pinks, reds, purples, and blues all sewn together. This was not quite half the pieces. Then it went back into the closet.

I resurrected it this week and am now working on aquas, teals, and greens. Originally I thought I'd need about 5 groups of eight rows in order to hit that 1998 mark, but I wasn't sure if I could come up with enough yellows and oranges for a group of eight, or enough browns, grays, and blacks for the last group of eight rows. But I have 27 rows now, and if I add another row of pinks and another row of purples, that'll make it 29, so I think I'll make it.

I'll applique the last two triangles on top of the border, and I'll add another triangle in the border for every year past the year 2000. I even have millennium fabric for the back.