Back to Planning the Veggie Quilt

Well this past weekend I made some tiny steps towards getting my sewing area back and running. I was in a down mood and just ironing fabric for a few hours was really soothing.  But I am still in need of organizational structures like drawers and shelves, so I can only do so much (also I am a horrible procrastinator).

In the meantime, I pulled open indesign to toodle around a little on planning my veggie quilt.  You may recall way back when I was trying a million layout options and hating all of them. Well in the months I haven't been quilting, I have been pondering this quilt, and I decided to do simple veggie blocks, on point, with a cool sashing and fun border to spice it up.  I have been savings photos I find online of quilts with cool sashing, and this weekend I sat down in InDesign to create some designs. The first one is completely based off the sashing in a quilt photo I had saved - nope, don't know where it came from.

The colors choices, for the time being, are just arbitrary placeholders, as is the outer border, which I just sort of slapped on. Now I personally think this looks pretty awesome, but if my quilt, which is supposed to be for laps, is about 60" max, those veggie blocks are down to a mere 6 inches. Plus the proportion for the border is off; it should probably be fatter which would mean shrinking the center further. Or maybe I can do an inset border that the main design extends onto, although I am not sure how.

So here is the version that I pared down. I don't think it looks nearly so cool. In this version my blocks are up to 8.5 inches, which is less awful but still a bit small for a quilt that is supposed to actually be about the veg. I looked up some of my veggie patterns, and they are designed for 12" blocks. I think I could get away with 9" or 10."

It could also be cool, perhaps, to have the veggies themselves bursting out of the blocks because the designs are so much bigger than the background. There might be some color clash issues there, I would have to be very careful in the colors I choose for the sashing. That also begs the issue of whether I assemble the entire top before doing the (machine) applique, so that pieces can overlap properly?

This is my awesome doodle of how I would fill the corners - with applique designed by me! The upper two corners are bean plants, the lower left is a basket and cat, and the lower right is Alaskan wildflowers (I know, totally realistic representation, right?)

But after all the issues espoused above, I thought maybe I needed a different layout altogether to keep my blocks big but the overall quilt small(ish).

I haven't quiet finished my thought on this version. The beige would be the veggie blocks, the green would be some kind of awesome geometric design. In this version the blocks are cool 12" each. This loses the fun applique designed by me, but then I don't have to try to design my own applique (win!)

So, what do you think so far? Any designs jump out? Any tips on layout?