"I hope she doesn't ask me to stitch anything like that,” Harriet said.

"You won't have to worry-she does her own quilting on her home sewing machine. You're the quilt depot, aren't you?"

Harriet nodded.

"You'll get to see it then even if she doesn't come to Loose Threads. Check it out when you do-you'll see what I mean. Avanell would have to keel over dead for Lauren to have a chance, and even then it wouldn't be certain."

"Let's have a look at yours,” Harriet said. She didn't want to be forced into taking sides before she'd even met Lauren.

Jenny's quilt was a simple double-four patch set on point. The basic form was four squares of fabric arranged to make a square. In a double-four patch, two diagonal squares were themselves made up of four smaller squares. She'd chosen a rich berry-toned floral as the focus fabric then combined it with pistachio and antique green batiks with a touch of dusty rose hand-dyed cotton. It was a queen-sized bed cover and was destined for the guestroom in Jenny's house after the show.

"This is very nice,” Harriet said. “Have you thought about what style of stitching you want on it?"

"Well, I've toyed with the idea of putting smallish feather patterns continuously in the sashing and then just having parallel lines in the four patch blocks. I'm not sure, though. I would rather have the double four patch blocks as the focus."

On a quilt, sashing pieces were the rectangles of fabric used to frame the main blocks. Harriet had seen a lot of them where the designer had intended the sashing to enhance the pattern but in fact it had done just the opposite. In Jenny's quilt, though, it definitely added to the overall effect.

"What if we put a flower pattern on the double-four patch blocks with mirror images in the matching squares, and then did a simpler version of the flower in the sashing?” she suggested. “That way, the blocks will stand out, but the sashing will still seem like it's framing each block."