A New Quilt Series (and exciting bonus contest!)

Did you notice that title? DID you?? Not just "a new quilt" but "a new quilt series"! Lalalaaaa. Justified or not, I'm feeling all accomplished and obnoxiously pleased with myself at the moment. Can you tell? Here's the deal. It all started when I did this little doodle. At some point one of the drawings on that page started whispering in my ear that maybe it wanted to be more than just a doodle on a steno pad. It thought it could have more impact. It had AMBITIONS. It became, in fact, a bit annoying. It went from whispering gently, "Pppsstt....Hey, Deb. Wouldn't I look good bigger and in color? Maybe I should be a quilt. Huh? Whatdya think?" to whining loudly, "WELL...Are you EVER gonna turn me into a quilt? Huh? Are you? When? WHEN are ya gonna Dooooooo it? I wanna be a quilt Noooooowww." Sheesh. So eventually, in sheer self-defense, I interrupted my intense winter book-reading and movie-watching schedule and got out the damn fabric and started cutting. I finished a background and guess what. Go ahead, guess! Did you guess that I loved it? Wrong. I hated it. It SO did not work and after a few days of trying without success to figure out how I might salvage it, I decided I'd toss it and start over. As it turned out, I did start over, but I didn't actually toss the first background. I just left it sulking there on the design wall, like a beauty pageant runner-up who is smiling and talking about world peace while desperately hoping the winner will break both legs or get caught fooling around with a judge. Luckily, the second background turned out much better than the first and I was off and running! Yay! A couple of days went by and I was quite pleased with how this little quilt was turning out. That doodle may have been loud and annoying, but it was also right - it DOES look good in color. But about the time I was finishing up that small quilt, a strange thing happened. I started seeing an image in my mind. This image featured the same sort of motif as the quilt I was finishing, but was a different design. But that wasn't the strange thing. The strange thing is that this new design was presenting itself to me on the runner-up background. Go. Figure. Turns out the first background wasn't ugly after all, it was just in the wrong pageant! So in the past couple of days I've finished that one too and with two finished pieces in the same theme, I'd call that the start of a new series, wouldn't you? Yeah, baby! Take a look: Untitled (so far!) #1, 13 1/4" x 16" (The first quilt idea on the second background) Untitled (so far!) #2, 12 1/2" x 13 1/2" (The second quilt idea on the first background) I have no idea what these things are exactly except that they're vaguely floral. I was riffing off my favorite spiral motif, like I use in the Sun series, but wanting to play with different shapes and somehow came up with these weird whirligig sort of flowers with the dancing stems. So far I've been mentally calling them Bullwinkle flowers because those shapes spinning off the center remind me of moose antlers. But come on....Bullwinkle flowers?? Um, no. Aside from sounding silly (which I could maybe learn to live with...oh, who am I kidding, of COURSE I can live with sounding silly! I do it all the time!), I'm thinking there could be legal issues related to calling them that and I don't want to deal with that sort of thing. SO. I need something else to call them. And THAT, m'dears, brings me to a little contest! Does a name occur to YOU when you see these? Not so much individual names for the quilts, but a series name is what I'm after. Up for grabs is a 4" x 6" fabric postcard that will tie into this same series. So if you have an idea for a series name, shout it out in comments (or by email if comments are a problem). If someone comes up with a name that makes me go "YES! That's IT!", I will say so and the contest ends and that person wins the postcard. But if none of them are quite right and I end up thinking of a name myself, then sometime this weekend I'll have a random drawing of all the names submitted and whichever one I pull out of the hat wins the postcard. Note the way I worded that - a "drawing of all the names submitted". That means if you suggest 6 series names, you have 6 chances to win! So play early and play often! Remember, if you want to play I have to be able to contact you for your snail mail addy so that I can send you the postcard. So if you have your blogger profile set to "anonymous" or "no-reply", you'll need to provide me with an email addy! (Geeze, in looking over this post it appears my Random Capitalization FETISH has gotten a bit out of hand. Is there a 12-step program for that??)