After months of distraction I am getting ready to tackle the last season for Becky's table...spring. Her dishes,(Keralia by Arabia) with their grayish ground and heavy black/brown banding, lend themselves more to autumn and winter than summer and spring. Plates with strong character often are difficult to adapt to various settings but my challenge is to represent all four seasons with the same dishes, so I must work with these. I was lucky in finding a kantha cloth with the right color background for summer and a wool scarf for fall. The winter cloth I made is documented here in the blog. (I never have had good luck linking to my own posts.) For the spring cloth I settled on the robins egg blue cloth in the background, a change from the white cloth I usually start with. I thought I could discharge a pattern onto the blue but I have also been wondering if applique might work better. I need to keep the colors springy without compromising the relevance of the plates. Cleaning the studio yielded the dark brown print, a gift from my quilter sister-in-law Lynne. There isn't very much of it but both sides look good. Using it in the right proportions will be the trick. I have been making very short runners lately but this time I think I need a long one...90 inches. That means piecing even the blue, which reminded me of the woven square I did for Dee's Hearts for Charleston quilt. I am imagining woven insets in this long runner, which would allow me to ration the brown effectively. It will make a more graphic pattern than I had first envisioned, but it might be a good variation, given the other cloths I already have waiting. I am going to plan the woven pieces and then let the runner tell me where to go from there.