With my impending visit to purchase more Japanese fabric the next day, I felt I must prepare for changing my mind completely about the quilt. 

My thought processes therefore went like this .....

 

1) I'd decided on making the Rose Window into a centre 'diamond' and so I'd look for another colour  fabric (I'd seen some gold/orange plain fabric on the supplier's website) to replace the navy I had wanted. I'd also look for red plain fabric as panels to complete a border to the quilt. This would result in a large square quilt. In addition, my husband came up with a lovely idea of finding how 'Margaret' (my sister's name) looked in Japanese, and if possible, to applique her name on the top panel. I really liked that idea so set about 'googling' to find the Japanese for Margaret.

 

2) If I couldn't make the Rose Window into a quilt, then I'd complete it as a wall-hanging and be done with it.

 

3) However, I really did want to make a quilt for my sister as I could imagine how much she may like one to use on her day-bed or just to have over her when sitting in a chair, so I sat down to think about a completely different, but still 'simple' quilt design. My first thoughts were to purchase a 'Layer cake' of Japanese fabrics - a 'pile' of 30 10-inch squares in a random variety of fabrics - and simply join them together, back them and quilt very simply. I felt, though, that this was 'the easy way out' as there would have been little effort made into choosing the fabric colours I knew my sister liked, so out came the squared paper and I started designing another quilt, using squares/diamonds but joined and intersected by borders so the fabric in the squares would stand out. I decided on 3 different fabrics and calculated all the yardage I would require if I was to go ahead. I now had an alternative if I was not able to progress on making the Rose Window into a quilt.