Strange; very strange...

Go and buy (lots of) fabric. Pore over it, pat it, fiddle with it, hold it up against self, walls, cats, willing friends, unwilling husbands, the kid walking past on his way home from school.

Eventually, having repeated the above many, many times so as to accumulate a large and unwieldy stash of pristine fabrics.. buy the book. More books. Magazines, flyers, exhibition booklets, online freebies and lots of photos of bits of mosaic and stained glass.

Divert yourself into knitting and crochet for ... several ... years.

Get a grip; install a big bookcase; stuff it full of sorted stash.

Then sign up to a class!

Next thing, you are engaged in cutting up purrfectly good bits of fabric into TINY LITTLE BITS. These scatter all over your worktable, ironing board (aka back-up worktable); bed, floor, clothes and cat. Sort, re-sort, sigh, swear, and sob over them until some semblance of what you intended the pattern to be, manifests itself.

Endure the delay caused by lack of sewing machine foot/needle/thread of correct/lack of ability to remember how to use it cos it's been so long ... thread, re-thread, test bobbin, swear a lot more....

... and!!! ...

produce a bloody marvellous bit of patchwork, all those tiny bits of fabric now neatly (if not necessarily very accurately) sewn up into something that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Spend far too long patting, de-threading, ironing, tweaking and admiring, and hanging the result on all those mentioned in the first sentence. Decide that borders don't scare YOU and pick the width, easily.

Stop it before you go blind, demented and/or sew it back-to-front (a distinct possibility) and be taken out to dinner.

I think this counts as progress! Today brought to you by eau-de-ironed cotton, and ... and ... just you wait for the photo.