Doodling

So last Sunday I was sitting in church doodling. (Yes, I was listening while I doodled! I do that in meetings at work, too.) And I drew this design (for a quilt) that I absolutely LOVE!

I have spent all week trying to figure out how to make it and keep the strips as full strips that only break at the next color change. You can see the darker pencil lines in the bottom of the doodle where I was trying to break the design into blocks.

Kirsten even tried to figure out how to divide it up into blocks and keep the strip areas in strips. She came up with a pretty good, if not perfect, solution, but I'm not giving up on perfect yet.  Seriously, draw it out and see if you can figure it out!  In fact, if someone can figure it out and sends me a solution that I like, I'll put together a few pretty fat quarters and send them to you.  But keep in mind, I want to keep each "L" section as only 2 strips of fabric, not cut into squares and pieced back together to make it look like strips.

So, while this puzzle has been simmering away in the back of my brain, I'm planning how to make this quilt and I'm trying to decide on fabrics and background (bright colors with a black background, maybe?) Yesterday I saw this quilt on Jaybird Quilts blog, but I decided it was different enough that my design still looked original.  Then, tonight I'm blog-stalking and find this pattern by Heather Mulder Peterson. Can I say I'm kinda bummed?  Okay, so it isn't exactly the same.  Her squares don't weave around each other and the squares are each made from 4 different fabrics, but still it's freakishly similar to my doodle!

I guess it's really true that there just aren't any truly original ideas anymore or maybe we are all just thinking on the same wavelength and we really do come up with similar original ideas.  I'm still going to make mine and I even thought a good name for it would be something like "All Linked Up" or something like that.  And her pattern is different enough that it still doesn't solve my puzzle of making the squares look like they are made from strips because her squares don't weave over and under and around each other. 

So next time you make something that you're sure you thought up all on your own and you post it to your blog and then you see the exact same thing on someone else's blog without giving you any credit, because you know it was your original idea and they must have stolen it from you, don't lose sleep from being upset about it because all of us crafty people have fabulous ideas and sometimes we have the exact same fabulous ideas completely separate from one another and even at pretty much exactly the same time.

Thanks for letting me vent.  I'm really not bummed anymore, except I still haven't figured out the strips yet :)